The title is overdoing it and this isn’t my favorite podcaster, but , Sam handles it well. The question is about panpsychism, but the answer applies broadly to any challenge to what we can know and how we know what we know. They mention a two book series from from Ian McGill while talking about the bicameral brain. I’m not sure how that fits in. Apparently, it’s “The Master and the Emissary” and “The Matter with Things.”
I’m not planning to explore this necessarily, but I thought it was interesting. The idea that no matter how much you meditate or alter your consciousness, there’s a limit to what you know about what you are and how you can continue to examine whatever that “self” is.
This is exactly what I mean by medieval philosophy.
2 minutes, 16 seconds
I don’t get it. Like I have thoughts that you cannot access. You have thoughts that I cannot access. If we’re not going to call that distinction, that big wall between us, the self, then like what is that thing?
“That thing” is the fact that you an evolved animal and individual organism. The only reality “you” will ever be privy to, is your own subjective impression of physical reality.
This is because it is our very own body in the act of living that creates your conscious awareness. That is also why you will never really “know” what it is like to be some other organism.
Science provides a tool, a lens, a portal, to some of the facts of nature - which we do our best (or not) to interpret into meaning as best we can grasp given our commitment to honest learning.
2:50 “… the first step to unraveling …”
7:28 “pure being”
That’s worthless, we are biological being with unimagined complexities at work creating our body, sense, information processing systems - that is who we are.
“Pure being” jazz, are thoughts that humans have. And the thoughts we have, are once removed from the physical reality your sense, body, and brain are living within
8:18 “Which is there’s something that it’s like to be part of the universe, but it doesn’t seem like there’s something that it’s like to be another part, right?”
That’s cute.
11:30 “… it’s reasonable to speculate that you know there are parts of me that might be might be conscious now, that I the talking subject, either can’t, or don’t, in each present moment have direct access to. …”
And to the serious scientists it’s blindingly obvious that the functioning body, requires many layers of active interwoven consciousness tracking the myriad of functions involved in a body living every moment.
Our, voices, the introspective consciousness we are so rightfully proud of, that is the frosting on top of the awareness consciousness maelstrom that is your living body.
Awareness and Consciousness is a reflection our physical body’s need to know itself. Something that’s been life greatest challenge since the first single celled organisms started forming.
12:32 “And and so that for for me, pansychism just sort of um, and idealism, just don’t they don’t really helpfully to illuminate that apparent difference.”
12:46 “I think that the hemispheric divide of the brain is along with Ian McGilchrist perhaps one of the most significant psychological facts ever.”
Iain McGilchrist argues that the divide between the left and right brain hemispheres is significant because they don’t just process different types of information, but they attend to the world in fundamentally incompatible ways. This division evolved to solve a survival conundrum: living creatures must simultaneously pay narrow, targeted attention to grab food (left hemisphere) and broad, vigilant attention to avoid becoming food (right hemisphere).
Reviewers like A.C. Grayling and Michael Corballis argue that his conclusions go "far beyond the neurological facts”.
Seems like a reach, plus it still side steps the reality of us being evolved organisms, and all that has to teach us about our body and why it functions as it does.
15:40 If you want to think about emergence, the best place to start is with the invention of biology - that is when Earth and Geology and Chemistry figured out how to harness electricity via the Krebs cycle. Check out Nick Lane’s recent book Transformer for the details. Also, ‘Does the Krebs cycle provide the key to unlocking the “Hard Problem”?’
I keep wondering why and how do philosophers justify constantly ignoring the body during these sorts of discussions about consciousness? After all it is your body doing all the physical experiencing and tasting, etc. - Sure the brain is monstrously important, but without the body, the brain is pointless, useless, nothing.
Like a conductor without his full symphony, it doesn’t make sense.
Nature did create a brain, it created a totally integrated body that includes the brain. We are evolved creatures, to understand ourselves we need to start spending a bit of time understanding how evolution creates biological complexity.
Iain McGilchrist argues that the divide between the left and right brain hemispheres is significant because they don’t just process different types of information, but they attend to the world in fundamentally incompatible ways. This division evolved to solve a survival conundrum: living creatures must simultaneously pay narrow, targeted attention to grab food (left hemisphere) and broad, vigilant attention to avoid becoming food (right hemisphere).
{Notice, never a mention that we came from mammals and the mammal brain, then primate brain, this understanding would have a lot to add to any philosophical discussion about where, how, our brain became so exceptional. Plus split-brain is sexier, sells more copy.}
“So how can it simultaneously side step it?” When “evolve” never gets past a vague notion. That is how.
Because most of that discussion was pondering panpsychism, which is a 100% product of human imagination. I belong to that set of humans who strives to build their understanding upon solid physical understanding. Not to be mistaken with the mathematical realm, which is product of philosophy and assumptions, a valuable tool though dependent on the fickle user.
Even all those conjectures built upon split brain evidence, seems a bit premature and hyperbolic as the title says.
There is so god awful much missing from this mass media philosophical feed, you keep sharing bits of.
We are talking evolution when we stop to grasp that you, the body you exist within, started as a freak’n worm, own it! Learn to understand what it took to get from there to this dude/dudette pounding away at a laptop. One physical-incarnation at a time!
…
… Therefore, the notion that our perception of reality impacts physical reality seems hubristic self-aggrandizement, as if we actually were the center of the universe. (Not to be mistaken with our physical actions impacting physical reality!)
Up-to-date evolution teaches us about Biology’s Big Bang. When Earth, geology, and chemistry invented the Krebs cycle, which basically harnessed electricity, thereby creating biology, and in short order Life. Very simple life, we’d call it scum.
Turns out vitalism is true after all. Though as usual nature wrapped it into a complex package beyond human imagining. Then came science. (See Dr. Nick Lane’s “Transformer” for a tour.)
After lots and lots of time. Unfolding one day at a time. Came the Ediacaran & Cambrian explosion over half a billion years ago. This event seeded our Earth with the bazillion different kinds of complex life forms that have learned to survive everywhere on this planet in a bewildering variety over the past half a billion years
Each living creature possesses a body that has survived these past half a billion years’ worth of incarnations and changes. Each lineage 100% successful over those untold generations, unfolding one day at a time. At least, so far.
Does it not seem self-evident that every creature would own a unique way of viewing the world? One that is dictated by its form and function. Half a billion years of nature’s research, development, and culling.
How could physical reality possibly adjust itself for a self-sanctified species? Why would it want to?
Every living creature represents a survivor lineage. All existing on one and the same planet experiencing one and the same Moment of NOW racing through our Earth and Solar System. Qualia is your body experiencing the sensation of the actual happening.
We are Earth’s most amazing animal ever. Still it took eons worth of time spent evolving our bodies. While the different layers of interwoven structures and communication pathways developed. (If you check, you’ll see the experts know a great deal that philosophy seemingly refuse to engage with. We need to do the homework to learn about it.).
Here’s one more shot at painting a mental impression.
Metaphorically, the generations within us are sort of like an old-fashioned hand-dipped candle — one generation building upon, and dependent upon, the previous, then offering itself to build the next generation upon.
That something we can’t quite touch within ourselves is our evolved interior biological reality. That experience of Qualia? That is the subjective feeling of the living moment of Now coursing through your body.
The many interwoven bio-chemo-electrical-cardiovascular-lymphatic-interstitium-and whatnot systems cascading through our body in real time, experiencing what the senses are relaying. It has got to feel like something!
Scientists, not philosophers, are the ones building windows to this understanding.
When will new scientific understanding in evolutionary biology and such start getting incorporated into the philosophical discourse?
At least in so far as helping people figure out who they are, and why they behave as they do, and looking for pathways to a more peaceful constructive relationship with one self.
Here’s an incomplete introductory science author’s list
Biology together with time, and chemistry and geology, that is Earth’s processes created creatures and environments and competition, in short, evolution.
Honorable mention,authorDavid Quammen’sThe Tangled Tree of Life,a front and center history of the ‘70’s genetics revolution, that ushered in this golden age of biology.
There is something significant in appreciating that. Not just getting clear on some of the amazing highlights of the journey but the whole picture, it has some much to tell us about why we are how we are, there’s a huge value in that.
Key quote to me, after the guy asks his question, which is not that well-formed, then Sam does a lot of unpacking and framing, and at 7:55 says:
…”Let’s admit that, there’s still all the rest of the stuff that I’m presumably not capable of being conscious of, there, all of that still seems to be in the dark somehow. Only materialism, some form of physicalism, seems to get at that difference, which is, there’s something that it’s like to be part of the universe, but it doesn’t seem like there’s something that it’s like to be another part. Even with respect to one’s own mind and brain, that dichotomy will be born out.”
He goes on to talk about the left and right hemispheres of the brain having different experiences while a neurosurgeon probes a cortex. That “difference” Sam is describing seems analogous to the Physical Reality-Human Mindscape divide.
I can’t figure out how you arrive at that assumption.
Left brain, right brain, the amazing connections between it and every millimeter of your body - all that is physical stuff.
It is thoughts, and the mind, that are the Human Mindscape.
And the mind/thoughts are the signaling going on, at many different levels of our body.
The Qualia is the sensation of your body processing information, as in the living moment of NOW. That is your physical processes, bio-chemo-electrical pathways & potentials, neural, circulatory, lymphatic, interstitum, & whatnot, doing something and that something feels like something.
And it’s all happening within your body.
Physical Reality-Human Mindscape divide.
Is about recognize the difference between your body, the stuff that it’s made out of - same as the rest of the Earth’s living community - and that the thoughts individual bodies produce, that are of an entirely different order than the biological matter itself.
In principle, not all that different from the equipment at a radio station and at home, that sends and receives distance ephemeral signals out of ether, and turns them into living sounds that make sense to us..
And what’s that? I exist because I feel like something!
Excuse me, but in plain language - what a bunch of self indulgent clap trap.
It’s an example of Dunning-Kruger hitting people who believe they are the smartest in the world.
According to simple evolutionary biology reality - you feel like something because you exist! Because you inhabit a body that was created expressly to observe and track and feel awareness and engagement with what’s happening around you and to react - in order to survive.
As for the grand WHY? It’s simple, because if we didn’t, none of what we experience would be here to experience, neither would we.
I mean it’s simple, but that’s the problem with human ego, we won’t accept simple and straightforward, we want provocative and more, more, ever more.
So here we are, on the verge of unimaginable self-inflicted horrors, and acting like it’s simply another day, rather than a final countdown.
(Oh and as for that jazz about the left right brain, I think the stuff being talked about was running way ahead of where the science actually is. )
That’s what he says. He describes the experience in the mind.
He says that, the “what it is to experience a part of the universe,”
And that, the parts of the universe each mind does not experience
Almost exactly what he says, the difference
He doesn’t discuss that, except at the beginning when he’s saying what he isn’t going to speculate about in this talk.
That’s more of an aside. It’s what the interviewer is asking about, but Sam doesn’t go in depth in this interview, he’s giving a nod to it out of respect for the podcaster
Sorry, not even close. The way Harris hemmed and hawed through the panpsychism bit—I saw that as a fail. Sorry, and excuse my rhetorical excesses in the previous comment, but what can I say. You are exasperating; you never slow down enough to actually pay attention to the words I’m writing down. Always bringing up examples of historic genius minds to preview - that consistently demonstrate exactly that undercurrent of human exceptionalism, self-absorption and disregard for physical reality that’s driving my cognitive dissonance.
You say Sam say exactly what I say, but don’t offer any quotes. I don’t hear it. Similar, why not, could be, but not anywhere close to what I’ve been enunciating.
The Descartes–Nagel–Chalmers mind experiment is a product of thoughts upon thoughts, wrapped around more thoughts and confined within the bubble of our intellect, dependent on the stories we can weave them into. Evolutionary biology is trivialized while the human mind gets exalted.
Still, we invented science as a real-world touchstone to compare our ideas against. Modern science has been busy learning the lessons needed to create a solid “theory of mind” from the inside out, upon the building blocks of life.
But if philosophers choose never to spend time getting up to speed on that, they can’t have any idea how far behind Descartes–Nagel–Chalmers mindset is.
Rather than this “what it feels like” misdirection, which implies that feelings are the definition of existing, we should actually be learning why the body came before feelings — heck, before bodies.
Only biological creatures have the ability to feel like something, because that is the freakin’ inevitable consequence of being an evolved biological creature living in a physical world. Qualia is the living moment of Now coursing through your body, how could that not feel like something?
I believe evolutionary biological appreciation deserves — heck, it needs to be — put front and center in any modern philosophical theory of mind.
Lausten, I feel like you keep dissing me for pursuing this — don’t be surprised that I keep pushing back. Because I’m serious: your brand of obsolete philosophical/theological complacency needs to be shattered. Evolutionary biological reality deserves prime time for a while.
And I’m going to continue doing my damnedest to be a part of forcing those growing pains to happen.
I know you saw it because you quoted me quoting it
…”Let’s admit that, there’s still all the rest of the stuff that I’m presumably not capable of being conscious of, there, all of that still seems to be in the dark somehow. Only materialism, some form of physicalism, seems to get at that difference, which is, there’s something that it’s like to be part of the universe, but it doesn’t seem like there’s something that it’s like to be another part. Even with respect to one’s own mind and brain, that dichotomy will be born out.”
You call it a divide. You try to discredit others by saying they call it a mystery. What do you mean by divide? To me, it’s that my mind can only access the universe that my senses can sense. I can get reports of other’s senses, I can extrapolate data to predict what’s out there, but there’s a divide.
Dr. Michael Levin is a biologist, computer scientist, and co-creator of the Xenobot — the world’s first living, programmable organism, built entirely from frog skin and heart cells. These tiny constructs can move, heal, and even replicate — making them the first-ever synthetic life forms capable of self-replication.
But this is just the beginning.
Dr. Levin’s research into bioelectricity is flipping biology on its head. He’s shown that cells use electrical signals — not just genes — to communicate, store memories, and make decisions. He’s grown eyes on tadpole tails, regenerated limbs, and reprogrammed cancer — all by changing cellular voltage, not DNA.
Expect to learn why intelligence might exist in every tissue of your body, how cells solve problems without brains, why memory can persist even after decapitation, how Xenobots replicate without a genetic blueprint, why bioelectricity may be the true architecture of consciousness, how Levin’s discoveries could transform medicine, ethics, and AI — and why your liver might be more self-aware than you think.
53:32 The Emergence of Subjectivity in Simple Organisms
55:23 The Theory of Consciousness and Its Implications
{Cc} 56:00 Regarding “what it feels like” Aren’t philosophers looking at it backwards?
We’re talking about actual physical beings, with hardware and processes, how could the composition of our biological body not have a sensation associated with it? How could our body not feel itself, itself is what creates our awareness to introspective consciousness.
Mind experiment, based on real memories.
Crawl into the bow of a ship, then crawl into the bow of another ship, and another, and so on. Sit there with eyes closed - every ship transmits a different aura to your senses and mind. A feeling that is transmitted through its very being and nothing else. Why should biological creations be any different?
Science & Cocktails is proud to announce an episode with biochemist Nick Lane, Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry and Director of the Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE) at University College London and author of the book “The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death”, who will tell you about what are the building blocks of life. How did life on Earth begin? Why did animals evolve so quickly in the ‘Cambrian explosion’? Why is the same biochemical cycle used to create and destroy? Can bacteria feel pain? What brings our own lives to an end? What brings the Earth to life and our own lives to an end? The answer is not 42, but something equally anodyne – the Krebs cycle. Most people learn about the Krebs cycle in school as a simple set of reactions used to generate energy in cells.
But we are not usually taught that it can also run backwards to turn simple gases into living matter. Or that this could be how life on Earth began. Or that this tension between creation and destruction – between burning organic molecules in respiration and forming them anew from gases – underpins ageing and diseases such as cancer. We are definitely not told that this tension might give rise to consciousness itself.
Nick Lane will tell you about these things over a cocktail or two. Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry and Director of the Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE) at University College London. His research is on how energy flow has shaped evolution from the origin of life to the evolution of complex eukaryotic cells and the emergence of traits such as sex, ageing and consciousness.
Nick has published more than 130 papers in leading journals including Nature, Cell and Science, and written five award-winning books which have been translated into 30 languages. Bill Gates called Nick Lane’s book The Vital Question “an amazing inquiry into the origins of life”.
I don’t. That’s something you say, but you don’t explain. I asked what you mean by the divide, and in this context, I’m asking how is what you say the divide is, different from what Sam says about one person’s (one body brain) view/experience being “divided” from all the other views/experiences and the rest of the physical universe?
The divide is between the biology of your body interacting with the physical world - that produces our awareness-consciousness, mind in short.
The divide between the human mind thinking the world was placed here for our consumption - and realizing we are another evolved biological animal, product of evolution, NOT divinity beings. Who started as worms and now have the power and the unbridled arrogance and unmitigated stupidity to be destroying our biosphere simply as fast as we can while . . .
Not to mention treating each other contemptible.
Those videos should help in clarifying how it’s possible, but it requires homework and the imagination threshold to climb out of your skin (intellectually speaking), and touch actually physical reality the way only science can do.
I know your usual answer. I specifically asked, how does your definition compare to the words I quoted, the ones about the consciousness experience that we all have, the one that gives a window into the universe but not an experience of the entire physical universe.
Physical Reality ~~~ Human Mind divide
Matter, Biology, Physical Interactions ~~~ Perceptions and Thoughts
Senses, Body, Brain ~~~ Awareness, Consciousness, Introspection
Flesh ~~~ Spirit
How can matter become thought ? Matter cannot become thought !
This is why appreciating Earth’s Evolution matters so critically.
Especially the matter of fact that you inhabit an evolved body.
Seriously, over half a billion years of evolution are packed into your body plan, that is DNA with its mysterious powers.
This body that is you, literally started as a tiny worm.
It already needed to be conscious of itself and surroundings way back then !
Consciousness has been one of nature’s main projects since the beginning - without recognizing that, philosophy remains empty talk that reflects ego more than reality.
As for what is Qualia, sit with that question. What creates the unique sensation of experience?
Imagine the wave of NOW sweeping over Earth over time. Think of all that biology inside of your body busy with sensing, processing, transmitting a whole array of bio-chemo-electrical-circulatory-lymphatic-interstitial-and whatnot systems doing the actual physical stuff of sensing, processing, handing off to brain and brain’s signals constantly cascading back to every crevice of our body.
How is all that activity not going to have a feeling attached to it?
A feeling unlike any other memory, or dream one can experience. Qualia is the fleeting living moment, that our lives unfold within.
Back to origins of matter becoming consciousness and thoughts.
Earth created circumstances that enabled geology and chemistry and time to create little atomic machines. The Krebs cycle. It quite literally harnessed electricity, invented biology and the potential for life. (This is where the “Hard Problem” rightly belongs! Surprise, chemistry resolves the challenge.)
In short order biology created life, then ATP and mitochondria appeared, after eons creating complex cells that contained a level of self awareness, (as shown by their self-serving behavior, seeking, rejecting, moving, advantageous consuming, advantageous excreting, self-protection, etc.), simply because it was a prerequisite for survival.
Literally a no brainer.
Anyone seriously wanting to understand “consciousness” needs to sit with that physical reality for a while and allow it to soak in.
Stop with all the intellectual flights of fancy and profit. Realize we are evolved biological animals - along with understanding what that means, evolutionarily and biologically. There you’ll find the pieces of understanding for established a solid constructive relationship with your warring spirit and flesh.
All the philosophical distractions we can dream up, don’t touch that simple tough love reality.
Our human ego’s need for a sense of exceptionalism, and drama, and making daddy proud. Philosophy presents the world of our mind - philosophy is wonderful, but believing we can find serious answers by ignoring physical reality, in favor of mind and intellectual gymnastics, has been a huge mistake. As the condition of our society demonstrates so horribly well.
(It took half a billion years for biology to hammer out the hardware that took us from an ameba’s already established consciousness to develop and refine our most spectacular consciousness - but the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers paradigm dismisses all that with a wave, and categorization as the “Easy Problem,’ trivial, barely worth acknowledging. As stated Chalmers Hard Problem communicates more about attitude and philosophical arrogance, than it could ever convey about the processes of creature consciousness - what specifically makes our evolved senses, body, brain, so similar in so many respects, yet so spectacularly different in outcomes.)
{Oh and it took simple cells some two billion years to hammer out the eukaryotic cells, that went on to make all complex life possible over the next half billion plus years. All unfolding one day at a time.}
For a better understanding for the voracity of this Evolutionary bottom-up perspective, and a wonderful tour of modern scientific understanding I recommend Michael Pollan’s recent book:
“… the fact we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives — scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic — to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.”
Lausten you may not understanding me, but I’ll bet Michael Pollan can get through.
He’s also selling books to a mass market of Americans and is a nice conservative conventional guy, who’s very cautious about his writing.
“remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries.”
Mystery sells, then we eat the covers and move on to the next mystery to embrace. I’m after resolving those mysteries, and have learned that nature isn’t the trickster in this equation of self-edification.
Pollan does a good job laying out the facts - once you get through a most cautious introduction, plus he’s a friend of Chalmers. It’s later in the book when the facts start getting piled up. You can make your own conclusion - and incidentally, he introduces many of the scientists I’ve featured, but you would have to read the entire book, not just the jacket and intro.
If you are only into a pissing contest, have at it.
If you want to learn something serious take the f’n time and do a little reading and some thinking on your own.
Incidentally, we (the great consensus) - also trashed our US Constitution, and are also destroying the world’s complex life supporting biosphere in leaps and bounds, and are fine with it, so your consensus attitude isn’t always worth embracing, in my considered opinion.
