Crick had three things you need to be a breakthrough scientist. A driving curiosity, an ability to sift through noise and see what is most important, and a willingness to shed "established knowledge" and rethink the science from scratch. He joins Einstein and others in those respects.
Leí el libro de una red viva de David Eagleman y por eso empecé a buscarlo en internet y este canal es lo mejor que hay para poder aprender, ojalá sigan subiendo videos. Saludos desde Veracruz, México 🇲🇽
The metaphor of a radio materialist in a desert trying to find the correlates between the radio and the voices deserves to be one the most interesting thought experiment. It's impossible not to love David Eagleman's genious brain
Great episode! I find it fascinating that we are currently converging on consciousness both from neuroscience and AI/programming/math perspective. Exciting times
David, as a layman not in the sciences (I write fiction and teach writing), I have studied evolution and neuroscience informally for several years, via books and CZcams lectures. It has guided my thinking and feeling as a writer. My thought here: I would like to see a neuroscientist rigorously study consciousness in other species, noting the various levels and structures of consciousness. Then analyze the differences in the apparent features and apparent experience of consciousness in other species. I wonder if that were done rigorously, whether some important inferences and advances in understanding consciousness would occur. Personally, my working theory is that consciousness, experience, subjectivity, and ability to abstract are closely related terms, and that the answers might lie in a shadowy territory, an uncertain space, much like relativity and quantum mechanics often rest on uncertainties. The shadowy space lies at the nexus of what we see as objectivity and subjectivity. The objective world can't be wholly known in an objective way by a single consciousness in any intuitive way. But science can makes theories, test them, and create common ground. But how do we know whether an alien race would come to the same scientific results, perhaps measuring or grokking differently from us, but rigorously also, in their own way? Then you get the shadowy world of subjectivity that neuroscience, psychology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and philosophy study. We can come to some tenuous agreements on that, either scientifically (by study of brain function) or rationally (when certain theories don't hold up to logic or thought experiments.) The term "intersubjectivity," coined by Edmund Husserl and popularized by John Searle among English and philosophy majors, might be a useful concept. The answers may live in the middle, the area where the objective world resists the subjects attempts to understand and the subjective mind resists attempts by objective researchers to study consciousness. Maybe all we can do is filter out the knowable from the presently unknowable. Anyways, that's how an interested layman thinks. The hardest questions are the most fun. 🙂
Favorite episode so far! Only thing I experience differently is I am usually conscious before and after waking. Before waking, I am in imagination schema which has been untethered from any modeling of physical realm for 8 hours. Ppl that awake from state 1 & 2 sleep often report they hadn't fallen asleep, also indicating they were still conscious, but primarily in imagination schema that was beginning to untether the of sounds in physical world from their physical cause and mapping instead to whatever they were thinking of. Of course, as you get deeper in sleep, the slowing frequency of brain waves hyperpolarizes cells, tending to prevent stimuli from entering cortex at all. I think why it feels like waking up is becoming conscious is that you map those sleep imaginations to 'not real,' which makes you forget, plus increase in brain wave frequency may lead to mapping to things in real world again frequently, shutting up the suggestions and memory frames of what you were just dreaming about.
Consciousness begins at the point where language breaks down and can no longer serve the function to form a message that is useful for us to accurately describe something, but the catch is we cannot even accurately describe anything. So in essence, consciousness permeates and pervades us. We are literally it trying to describe itself.
"consciousness permeates and pervades us" Self evidently... Mind is composed entirely of thoughts. Being conscious is a mental activity and therefore must be composed entirely of thoughts. The self is also a thought (though the definition may include the body). Thoughts are about something or other, including other thoughts. That is to say, thoughts represent. Impinging environmental energies initiate biochemical chain reactions that culminate in modulation of the discharge timing patterns of neurons that connect sense organs to the brain. These modulations are encoded representations of the impinging energies. Now extrapolate! Imagine every brain neuron is maintaining a representation (in the encoded form of its discharge timing pattern). Here we have our source of thoughts out of which selfs and minds and being conscious must be constituted. Imagine a hundred billion representations, a brainful, each synaptically connected with 20,000 (on average) other representations so that they are able to intermodulate in the process we call thinking. Now that we know how thoughts are physically instantiated our subsequent thoughts may figure out what a self is and how intermodulation can make a self conscious... Cheers!
Really very insightful video to have rational knowledge from scientific perspective... Have been doing meditation from last 1 year with lot many so called spiritual gurus however they have all imgination rather convincing logic for any kind of experience.... Best guard for them is - it can not be expressed in words as there is no words for those experiences... Another one is everyone is going to have different experiment.... Always wondering to have some rational & logical explanation for my own brain to convince it rather just going in black box with meditation..... There is lot of Jargon being used in spiritual world where you can't even ask question & always compel to experience something during meditation session to tell everyone that you felt something.... I guess now is the time to integrate Science with Meditation rather going to Guru.... I am big fan of you on how you explain the Brain which seems to be most complicated stuff even more than our cosmos....
You ask all the questions I do in such a simple way. Great work. After watching the way large language models work, with a prompt.. Causing a chain reaction of probability for the next word, I believe that's what's happening in our heads. Simple example is when you try and remember the lyrics to a song you know, you have to start at the start to get to the part you forgot. Because you need that language model to follow a sequence. I believe memory which is intimately tied to consciousness, must have some physical changes happen when learning new info, the I. Pulse pattern may cautirise a neuron or I saw somewhere it may even unpack the DNA and alter it. When when the same pattern or similar fires through the network, it activates anything similar within a certain region, forming a cascade of thoughts and memories in your conscious mind. I'd love to put someone, young with few memories or old with dementia, into a sensory dep tank, scan their brain, teach them something new. Scan the brain again and see if you can locate where that memory is stored. Then we just need to analyse those neurons and see what changed. How did it no activate prior to the learning and now suddenly activates when it recalls that new info. There in lies the secret to consciousness. How are memories stored. And once we know that. We will have a better understanding of how the average of a collection of memories forms the perception of consciousness. Which is probably just us experiencing the decided tip of the iceburg of indicision
It's one thing (a big thing) to become conscious of the feel of silk or the feeling of rain on a hot summer day...but it's yet (maybe) a bigger thing to judge that feeling. Why don't I like raw broccoli? My conscious self can taste it, experience it, notice it...but it also judges it as favorable or unfavorable. It's that last step that interests me with regard to AI. While two machines might become sentient at the same time, will both machines like or hate the same things? Will one machine think that humans are cute and adorbs, while the other thinks we're mangy varmints that are pests to be eradicated? I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. Had I not chosen to do music as a career, if I could go back in time, I'd seriously consider going into neurological science. Thanks for the podcast!
Seems like I finally found my lost kindred: cat lover, a career in music, and a neverending fascination for neuroscience and perception and behavioral neurobiology. Tip of the hat to you, good sir/lady! :D
David, have you thought about the unconscious? There is so much going on, both past and present, that we need a storage space? And does this apply to memory? Thank you.
Having trouble with the "emergence" concept and the ant farming analogy. What arises from individual ant behavior is an economy, an activity (farming), and perhaps a culture based on those. With the human mind, a thing called experience arises a sense of ongoing narrative, with all manner of self-awareness and mental life that in itself can create feedback loops. I get emergence as a general analogy of of parts to the whole, but what arises are two different things. We still lack understanding of experience, consciousness, and subjectivity.
What could we be missing like the guy with the radio? Our mainstream neuroscience ignores the interior of the cell in this context, like trying to understand an animal by only measuring its skin. The inside is filled with highly ordered arrangements of microtubules and actin and spectrin. There is a lot of new experimental work that bears on this issue…for example in papers by Anirban Bandyopadhyay apparently showing interactions between microtubule resonances and membrane potential spikes; and that it spans across a pair of neurons.
We are just basically a higher level computer, no different from what we call a basic computer. We all perfoming instructions based on stimuli. How we process them might be different. Consciousness itself might be a byproduct of what we call LIFE itself. Its our own personal experiences subjective to us, but its really nothing, but it means so much to us. Like i said, we are no different from a computer, we might be diffrent in awareness. Beyond that, its nothing.
since all the signals in the brain are made of the same stuff, what differentiates them. Is it the repetitive rhythms that are different and they get somehow bundled together ? And how many bundles make up consciousness, layers and layers?
86 billion cells not 100 billion ur living in d past this video is obviously older then what it shows brilliant scientist David hight of respect for ur work neuroscience has thought me so much
Yay Binding Problem! A quantum substrate is the only possibility because there are no irreducible wholes in classical physics. The experimental evidence is mounting eg Babcock 2024 microtubule super radiance (a quantum phenomenon) at room temperature!
Really enjoy the content of the podcast. One small comment though, the constant switching between two perspectives makes it difficult to watch. I'm sure you have a program set up that does this automatically, and having the change of perspective is visually interesting, but I think it's happening too often. The constant switch every couple seconds is distracting and actually makes you a little hard to watch. Just a small feedback--the content is great.
Hi eagleman huge fan , i have a question, If the whole universe and its structure infuences our conciousness then change in universe can effect our conciousness, this basically means that aliens are trying to communicate to us through conciousness?
Sure if all the pieces of a plane are assembled correctly and the plane is all systems go the plane flies but the plane is not conscious.It's not ALIVE.The same goes for computers.Many people in the quantum physics community think of consciousness as being transcendent.If it were an emergent thing as you say we could bring people back from the dead by now just by getting all things all systems go again in the brain and body.There are two things that scientist think of as being transcendent: the eternal void that everything came from at the time of the big bang and consciousness.
I had to stop watching because of the jump cuts. I know they're supposed to be good for retention but ... they just have the opposite effect on some people. It's a shame - your presentation style is good it would have been cool to hear your theories - I just can't. I ended up leaving the video playing while I (finally) googled "why do youtubers use jump cuts when they're just speaking to the camera. Now I know.
@ElParacletoPodcast you take an easy shot without giving him credit on how sound his juxtaposing of examples to a mind/intelligence/consciousness is from relatable systems, be it organic or inorganic. Your concerned “bigger problem” would be his eventual address, since it should be a tool an organism advanced from aesthetic-experience-chemistries to none chemicalized signals. you then are the “another failed” comment, due to your unattempted critique to contradict where his relations of systems fail. but ya, it’s a fail, if unless original-progressed nothing from common ignorance on the overall subject of M/I/C since Michael Levin’s works on bioelectrics near appropriate steps to inquire on given academic knowledge to what is the materiality of M/I/C, which already code without the sequences of genotypes. I’ll tell you soon, about all that up there slapped to you, sometime this year
This conflates reaction to stimuli, and conciousness. This materialist world view can not account for metaphysics, and requires being granted creation, as well as evolution. It isn't even a hypothesis. To be a legit hypothesis, you would have to come up with control, dependent, and indepe variables to perform a scientific experiment. There is nothing proveable related to conciousness to remove and add in order to conduct an experiment. If a brain is damaged, it could be said that the body's ability to react to stimuli is damaged, but can show that the person's actual conciousness is effected. This dude uses the terms theory and hypothesis interchangeably. A good sign that he is intentionally bastardizing the scientific method.
Another failed attempt to define consciousness, then you have an even bigger problem, moral thoughts, that have nothing to do wit the physical, but with abstract concepts.
you take an easy shot without giving him credit on how sound his juxtaposing of examples to a mind/intelligence/consciousness is from relatable systems, be it organic or inorganic. Your concerned “bigger problem” would be his eventual address, since it should be a tool an organism advanced from aesthetic-experience-chemistries to none chemicalized signals. you then are the “another failed” comment, due to your unattempted critique to contradict where his relations of systems fail. but ya, it’s a fail, if unless original-progressed nothing from common ignorance on the overall subject of M/I/C since Michael Levin’s works on bioelectrics near appropriate steps to inquire on given academic knowledge to what is the materiality of M/I/C, which already code without the sequences of genotypes. I’ll tell you soon, about all that up there slapped to you, sometime this year
Thank you so much for truly expanding our understanding of human behavior.
Thank you so much, Inner Cosmos is my favourite podcast at the moment.
The universe and reality was created for us.
Crick had three things you need to be a breakthrough scientist. A driving curiosity, an ability to sift through noise and see what is most important, and a willingness to shed "established knowledge" and rethink the science from scratch. He joins Einstein and others in those respects.
Leí el libro de una red viva de David Eagleman y por eso empecé a buscarlo en internet y este canal es lo mejor que hay para poder aprender, ojalá sigan subiendo videos. Saludos desde Veracruz, México 🇲🇽
The metaphor of a radio materialist in a desert trying to find the correlates between the radio and the voices deserves to be one the most interesting thought experiment. It's impossible not to love David Eagleman's genious brain
Thank you Sir!
Great episode! I find it fascinating that we are currently converging on consciousness both from neuroscience and AI/programming/math perspective. Exciting times
Thank you❤
David, as a layman not in the sciences (I write fiction and teach writing), I have studied evolution and neuroscience informally for several years, via books and CZcams lectures. It has guided my thinking and feeling as a writer. My thought here: I would like to see a neuroscientist rigorously study consciousness in other species, noting the various levels and structures of consciousness. Then analyze the differences in the apparent features and apparent experience of consciousness in other species. I wonder if that were done rigorously, whether some important inferences and advances in understanding consciousness would occur.
Personally, my working theory is that consciousness, experience, subjectivity, and ability to abstract are closely related terms, and that the answers might lie in a shadowy territory, an uncertain space, much like relativity and quantum mechanics often rest on uncertainties.
The shadowy space lies at the nexus of what we see as objectivity and subjectivity. The objective world can't be wholly known in an objective way by a single consciousness in any intuitive way. But science can makes theories, test them, and create common ground. But how do we know whether an alien race would come to the same scientific results, perhaps measuring or grokking differently from us, but rigorously also, in their own way?
Then you get the shadowy world of subjectivity that neuroscience, psychology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and philosophy study. We can come to some tenuous agreements on that, either scientifically (by study of brain function) or rationally (when certain theories don't hold up to logic or thought experiments.) The term "intersubjectivity," coined by Edmund Husserl and popularized by John Searle among English and philosophy majors, might be a useful concept.
The answers may live in the middle, the area where the objective world resists the subjects attempts to understand and the subjective mind resists attempts by objective researchers to study consciousness. Maybe all we can do is filter out the knowable from the presently unknowable.
Anyways, that's how an interested layman thinks. The hardest questions are the most fun. 🙂
Fascinating. Thank you for your passion and insight. I read Sum last month and reading Livewired now. Keep it all coming!
Favorite episode so far! Only thing I experience differently is I am usually conscious before and after waking. Before waking, I am in imagination schema which has been untethered from any modeling of physical realm for 8 hours. Ppl that awake from state 1 & 2 sleep often report they hadn't fallen asleep, also indicating they were still conscious, but primarily in imagination schema that was beginning to untether the of sounds in physical world from their physical cause and mapping instead to whatever they were thinking of. Of course, as you get deeper in sleep, the slowing frequency of brain waves hyperpolarizes cells, tending to prevent stimuli from entering cortex at all. I think why it feels like waking up is becoming conscious is that you map those sleep imaginations to 'not real,' which makes you forget, plus increase in brain wave frequency may lead to mapping to things in real world again frequently, shutting up the suggestions and memory frames of what you were just dreaming about.
Saludos desde México 🇲🇽
Consciousness begins at the point where language breaks down and can no longer serve the function to form a message that is useful for us to accurately describe something, but the catch is we cannot even accurately describe anything. So in essence, consciousness permeates and pervades us. We are literally it trying to describe itself.
"consciousness permeates and pervades us"
Self evidently...
Mind is composed entirely of thoughts.
Being conscious is a mental activity and
therefore must be composed entirely of thoughts.
The self is also a thought (though the definition may include the body).
Thoughts are about something or other, including other thoughts.
That is to say, thoughts represent.
Impinging environmental energies initiate biochemical chain reactions that
culminate in modulation of the discharge timing patterns of neurons that
connect sense organs to the brain.
These modulations are encoded representations of the impinging energies.
Now extrapolate!
Imagine every brain neuron is maintaining a representation
(in the encoded form of its discharge timing pattern).
Here we have our source of thoughts
out of which selfs and minds and being conscious must be constituted.
Imagine a hundred billion representations, a brainful, each synaptically connected
with 20,000 (on average) other representations so that
they are able to intermodulate in the process we call thinking.
Now that we know how thoughts are physically instantiated
our subsequent thoughts may figure out what a self is and how
intermodulation can make a self conscious...
Cheers!
You've described being drunk.
Really very insightful video to have rational knowledge from scientific perspective... Have been doing meditation from last 1 year with lot many so called spiritual gurus however they have all imgination rather convincing logic for any kind of experience.... Best guard for them is - it can not be expressed in words as there is no words for those experiences... Another one is everyone is going to have different experiment.... Always wondering to have some rational & logical explanation for my own brain to convince it rather just going in black box with meditation..... There is lot of Jargon being used in spiritual world where you can't even ask question & always compel to experience something during meditation session to tell everyone that you felt something.... I guess now is the time to integrate Science with Meditation rather going to Guru.... I am big fan of you on how you explain the Brain which seems to be most complicated stuff even more than our cosmos....
Have you considered having a debate with Bernardo Kastrup? I would love to witness that.
You ask all the questions I do in such a simple way. Great work.
After watching the way large language models work, with a prompt.. Causing a chain reaction of probability for the next word, I believe that's what's happening in our heads.
Simple example is when you try and remember the lyrics to a song you know, you have to start at the start to get to the part you forgot. Because you need that language model to follow a sequence.
I believe memory which is intimately tied to consciousness, must have some physical changes happen when learning new info, the I. Pulse pattern may cautirise a neuron or I saw somewhere it may even unpack the DNA and alter it.
When when the same pattern or similar fires through the network, it activates anything similar within a certain region, forming a cascade of thoughts and memories in your conscious mind.
I'd love to put someone, young with few memories or old with dementia, into a sensory dep tank, scan their brain, teach them something new. Scan the brain again and see if you can locate where that memory is stored.
Then we just need to analyse those neurons and see what changed. How did it no activate prior to the learning and now suddenly activates when it recalls that new info.
There in lies the secret to consciousness. How are memories stored. And once we know that. We will have a better understanding of how the average of a collection of memories forms the perception of consciousness. Which is probably just us experiencing the decided tip of the iceburg of indicision
It's one thing (a big thing) to become conscious of the feel of silk or the feeling of rain on a hot summer day...but it's yet (maybe) a bigger thing to judge that feeling. Why don't I like raw broccoli? My conscious self can taste it, experience it, notice it...but it also judges it as favorable or unfavorable. It's that last step that interests me with regard to AI.
While two machines might become sentient at the same time, will both machines like or hate the same things? Will one machine think that humans are cute and adorbs, while the other thinks we're mangy varmints that are pests to be eradicated?
I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. Had I not chosen to do music as a career, if I could go back in time, I'd seriously consider going into neurological science.
Thanks for the podcast!
Seems like I finally found my lost kindred: cat lover, a career in music, and a neverending fascination for neuroscience and perception and behavioral neurobiology.
Tip of the hat to you, good sir/lady! :D
David, have you thought about the unconscious? There is so much going on, both past and present, that we need a storage space? And does this apply to memory? Thank you.
This is what he is describing stucknut.
Having trouble with the "emergence" concept and the ant farming analogy. What arises from individual ant behavior is an economy, an activity (farming), and perhaps a culture based on those. With the human mind, a thing called experience arises a sense of ongoing narrative, with all manner of self-awareness and mental life that in itself can create feedback loops. I get emergence as a general analogy of of parts to the whole, but what arises are two different things. We still lack understanding of experience, consciousness, and subjectivity.
What could we be missing like the guy with the radio? Our mainstream neuroscience ignores the interior of the cell in this context, like trying to understand an animal by only measuring its skin. The inside is filled with highly ordered arrangements of microtubules and actin and spectrin. There is a lot of new experimental work that bears on this issue…for example in papers by Anirban Bandyopadhyay apparently showing interactions between microtubule resonances and membrane potential spikes; and that it spans across a pair of neurons.
Experiment: The Easy Way to safely explore personal consciousness/inner universe: Sing *HU* daily. Search how to sing *HU* . Keep It Simple Soul.
We are just basically a higher level computer, no different from what we call a basic computer. We all perfoming instructions based on stimuli. How we process them might be different. Consciousness itself might be a byproduct of what we call LIFE itself. Its our own personal experiences subjective to us, but its really nothing, but it means so much to us. Like i said, we are no different from a computer, we might be diffrent in awareness. Beyond that, its nothing.
since all the signals in the brain are made of the same stuff, what differentiates them. Is it the repetitive rhythms that are different and they get somehow bundled together ? And how many bundles make up consciousness, layers and layers?
“Consciousness is a dance between perception and memory.”
- Consciousness in a Nutshell
Thank you Homer Simpson.
How do you explain medium ships?
86 billion cells not 100 billion ur living in d past this video is obviously older then what it shows brilliant scientist David hight of respect for ur work neuroscience has thought me so much
How would you explain dreams ?
Very carefully 😊
Yay Binding Problem! A quantum substrate is the only possibility because there are no irreducible wholes in classical physics. The experimental evidence is mounting eg Babcock 2024 microtubule super radiance (a quantum phenomenon) at room temperature!
Really enjoy the content of the podcast. One small comment though, the constant switching between two perspectives makes it difficult to watch. I'm sure you have a program set up that does this automatically, and having the change of perspective is visually interesting, but I think it's happening too often. The constant switch every couple seconds is distracting and actually makes you a little hard to watch. Just a small feedback--the content is great.
Hey why’d you say my brain cells are tiny? I resemble that remark!
Hi eagleman huge fan , i have a question,
If the whole universe and its structure infuences our conciousness then change in universe can effect our conciousness, this basically means that aliens are trying to communicate to us through conciousness?
Sure if all the pieces of a plane are assembled correctly and the plane is all systems go the plane flies but the plane is not conscious.It's not ALIVE.The same goes for computers.Many people in the quantum physics community think of consciousness as being transcendent.If it were an emergent thing as you say we could bring people back from the dead by now just by getting all things all systems go again in the brain and body.There are two things that scientist think of as being transcendent: the eternal void that everything came from at the time of the big bang and consciousness.
My RED is not YOUR red, my son told me.
This is what im here for 😂
🤍
Can we have an episode about what happens to our brain that we commit suicide?
I had to stop watching because of the jump cuts. I know they're supposed to be good for retention but ... they just have the opposite effect on some people. It's a shame - your presentation style is good it would have been cool to hear your theories - I just can't. I ended up leaving the video playing while I (finally) googled "why do youtubers use jump cuts when they're just speaking to the camera. Now I know.
@ElParacletoPodcast
you take an easy shot without giving him credit on how sound his juxtaposing of examples to a mind/intelligence/consciousness is from relatable systems, be it organic or inorganic. Your concerned “bigger problem” would be his eventual address, since it should be a tool an organism advanced from aesthetic-experience-chemistries to none chemicalized signals.
you then are the “another failed” comment, due to your unattempted critique to contradict where his relations of systems fail.
but ya, it’s a fail, if unless original-progressed nothing from common ignorance on the overall subject of M/I/C since Michael Levin’s works on bioelectrics near appropriate steps to inquire on given academic knowledge to what is the materiality of M/I/C, which already code without the sequences of genotypes.
I’ll tell you soon, about all that up there slapped to you, sometime this year
This conflates reaction to stimuli, and conciousness.
This materialist world view can not account for metaphysics, and requires being granted creation, as well as evolution.
It isn't even a hypothesis. To be a legit hypothesis, you would have to come up with control, dependent, and indepe variables to perform a scientific experiment. There is nothing proveable related to conciousness to remove and add in order to conduct an experiment.
If a brain is damaged, it could be said that the body's ability to react to stimuli is damaged, but can show that the person's actual conciousness is effected.
This dude uses the terms theory and hypothesis interchangeably. A good sign that he is intentionally bastardizing the scientific method.
Another failed attempt to define consciousness, then you have an even bigger problem, moral thoughts, that have nothing to do wit the physical, but with abstract concepts.
you take an easy shot without giving him credit on how sound his juxtaposing of examples to a mind/intelligence/consciousness is from relatable systems, be it organic or inorganic. Your concerned “bigger problem” would be his eventual address, since it should be a tool an organism advanced from aesthetic-experience-chemistries to none chemicalized signals.
you then are the “another failed” comment, due to your unattempted critique to contradict where his relations of systems fail.
but ya, it’s a fail, if unless original-progressed nothing from common ignorance on the overall subject of M/I/C since Michael Levin’s works on bioelectrics near appropriate steps to inquire on given academic knowledge to what is the materiality of M/I/C, which already code without the sequences of genotypes.
I’ll tell you soon, about all that up there slapped to you, sometime this year