Sean Carroll - Physics of Consciousness

I don’t always agree with Sean, but he really is a great physicist and a fabulous speaker.

interesting conversation that truly exposes our limitations to knowing consciousness.

Sean seems to understand this quite well.

It’s amazing how materially minded someone can be that they can’t even see how consciousness is categorically different than material things. Just because “red” can be “mapped onto” physical processes, (read: reliably associated with) does not mean that these mind is IDENTICAL to the matter just because of correlation. Maybe Sean’s a zombie…

The LONG digression into the persistence of personal identity in Parfit-like “upload” cases was tedious and really kind of a diversion from the central topic.

Consciousness is the ability of an organism to perceive and interpret information. Since it has been determined that all matter boils down to excited vibrations within the respective quantum fields of fundamental particles, it only seems reasonable that information is the same and is contained within it's own quantum field. A "brain" is the organism within living creatures that can connect to this field. It is like a browser that connects to the consciousness web. When we die, the brain disconnects from this "web" but the information that makes up our knowledge and experience base, also known as our personality/soul, must surely live on within this quantum field. Seems to me this could perfectly explain NDEs and heaven. Anyway, that's MY theory of consciousness.

I think we need to change some of the language we use in QM that are not quite appropriate to what is going on or at least distinguish between different processes.
One of those Terms is measurement. If you could make measurement without interfering with the system than that could indeed be called measurement but if the act of measurement involves purturbing the state then that is not just measurement.
Then we can quantify how much puturbation a specifics state can tolerate before it is affect the state.
This will involve some real quatification and then extrapolation.
What happens when a wave turn Ms into a particle. Do they really exist concurrently or simultaneously, or oscilating between one and the other.
The whole language needs to be reviewed.
The language is not concise enough and leads to unnecessary misunderstanding.
You often find philosophical inconsitancies that are risen linguistically.
A lot physicists are blasai about the language they use.
Natural language are notoriously fluid.
Words change meanings from place to place, time to time and in translation.
The people who have been most aware of that Included the German philosopher Heidigger and the French psychologist Lacan.
Of course there was a time when linguistic was part of psychology.
Maybe there was a reason for using Latin in science.
If the exact meaning can not be translated then it shouldn't be or a whole new term needs to be used with a scientific dictionary kept rigourously Update‌.
Public lectures are often Places where lazy terminology takes root and before you know it it has crept into the classrooms and the scientific papers.

could it be defined as , awareness being aware of "itself" , and then we go down the rabbit hole.

Would you really know that?

Yes. That’s the point.

Consciousness is not physical.

From the moment the new Sean is activated, it becomes a completely separate conscious entity. Initially, its responses may closely mirror those of the original Sean, but over time, their experiences will diverge, leading to distinct consciousnesses. This is because consciousness is shaped by individual experiences and interactions, which cannot be identically replicated. Understanding that each consciousness is unique, even if they share an origin, is key to grasping this concept. The divergence is inevitable as each entity encounters different stimuli and processes them independently.

Today a lot of heavy metal from sir Carroll.

Every attempt to make more of consciousness than the pragmatic thing that it is, evolving through time, is coping. We can try and try and try to put more into it but in my opinion it's just refusing the "harsh" reality that we are biological machines with no afterlife. I also dont't understand that we humans think we are so special. Sure, the brain is amazing, but in the end we are all zombies, worker bees, we can't escape our evolutionary programming, and we are not metaphysical. I find it kind of sad how Mr Kuhn is still after all these years lying to himself and trying to find a soul. Especially here you saw the childlike attitude he develops, when someone finally makes some sense and doesnt bend to some wishful thinking. Rest in peace y'all

I understand both sides of the argument and both certainly have their merits. But in the end I could never take Carrol's position on this (though I agree with him about most metaphysics) because "consciousness is a convenient way of talking about things" boils down to "consciousness doesn't exist" and therefore "you don't exist". In the end, I deny this on first principles. I cannot deny the existence of my own mind. To even try to do so seems like a contradiction.
That said, to bring a more substantive argument against Carrol's approach, my biggest problem with it is that it seems to me like it leads into a sort of pansychism which I do not like at all. If Carrol does not deny his own subjective experience of self, i.e. the running movie or qualia or whatever you want to call it, and claims that there is a 1:1 mapping between that subjective experience and the physical reality of the neurons firing in his brain, then you can flip that argument around and swap out the human brain for anything else. If we are willing to accept the argument that some neurons firing, or whatever other physical process (presumably with some flow of data) maps to an existence of some subjective experience, then there is no basis to deny that same argument for anything else in the universe. Who is to say computers aren't conscious? You can take a running computer, prod it, attach probes, and if your methods are sophisticated enough, then you may even be able to deduce what it is thinking (i.e. produce a visual image of its output, without actually connecting a monitor). In that sense it is not very different from a human brain, and our current ability to produce limited output from brain waves.
To put it a simpler way, if Carrol both believes that some subjective inner experience exists (even for himself), and that humans are merely biological machines (no dualism), then unless he insists on the biological aspect, it seems to directly imply that any machine could have a subjective experience. If you take it further and start asking what a machine even is and where you would draw the line between things that do and don't have inner experiences, well, you're in panpsychism territory now.
I'm the eternal skeptic so I'm never convinced of anything, but for now it seems easier for me to accept that there is something special about my own consciousness, than accept the possibility that trees might be screaming on the inside.

Stopped watching after Seans first comment: "i think that consciousness is a way of talking about the physical world..."😂
These scientists must also be taught that there is nothing wrong with saying "i dont know".

The Buddha figured all of this out 2500 years ago. Form is emptiness is form.

Why is this so hard for Kuhn to understand. He's not special, Sean isn't special, I'm not special. Consciousness is not special..
Get over it

Regarding consciousness, until there is a descriptive mathematical or any other kind of scientific model in this regard that accurately describes where, how, when, and most importantly why consciousness arises at any given time, and such a model can be used to artificially manufacture, duplicate, alter, etc. consciousness agents, all of Sean's arguments are speculative opinions and belong in the world of metaphysics, which is funny because I heard between the lines that he is against any metaphysical phenomena.

Sean’s gotta learn meditation. He identifies with his immediate thoughts instead of The Being

Maybe Sean at the time of interview unconscious 😅

i thought they said “ship of feces” at first😅😂😂

I really enjoy listening to Sean Carroll. He can take a seemingly complex subject and relate it to the viewer in simple understandable terms.

there are 5 formless ACTIONS(VERBS) in the universe like light, sound, smell, taste etc. They can be only detected based on their interaction with perceivable entities(nouns).
Similary there are 8 unobservable or formless entities(nouns) like space, time, actions, matter, machinaries, ignorance, soul, GOD... etc and can be only itemized with their perceivable ACTIONS (verbs)

What will be if two mind unites

The multiple brain joined to each other they flashes to comes to a singularity like like a chemical products of addition

i think mister closer to is making more of this than needs be. as sean says if you make a copy, even a "perfect copy" you now have two seans, both different people. i don't see why he's going on and on about this? does he want to say there is still one person? or brains should communicate telepathically or what, cos from T0 onward they have different experiences.

If consciousness is fundamental, and it likely is, owing no debt to the elemental, then the title does not make sense, as if consciousness has no elements and is not a part of physics, there is no physics of consciousness. This is a misnomer.

Old dude didn't actually make a real point.

I never expected Sean Carroll to be so clear-headed. Kuhn seems to be a bit defensive that his beliefs can be so simply challenged with an alternative explanation.

Many years ago I wrote down some thoughts whether or not there was a “purpose” to the existence of the Universe.The existence of consciouness is a puzzle, only if you ignore Emergence. The Emergence of consciousness, at its roots, may simply be the inevitable result of the evolution of complexity inherent to the interactions of the Fields within the Wave Function of the Universe as it travels, and evolves, through Time on the playing field of Spacetime. We exist as entities at some point on that evolutionary path set down at the BB.The creation of the Wave Function of the Universe which began its journey at the BB, now travels that path. Its journey will ultimately play out on playing field governed by rules we barely comprehend. But it should surprise no one that over some immense Time period the random complex interactions taking place gave rise to some complex result which we now define as consciousness. We, who carry this consciousness, now question the very notion of existence itself. We are not unlike some version of AI which now seeks to answer the question of “why” it exists.

What physicality of consciousness?! Consciousness is not physical!

One thing we can see about consciousness through technology is a development... One upon a time the analog signal on your TV was blowing your minds when we were watching documentaries back in the '90s. Thin HD came along in 720p. Looked great. Then 2K came along and that made 720p look bad. Now we have TVs on the market that are 8K resolution and 4K is starting to look a bit average. This is an example of how technology is growing our consciousness and how now when you look back at analog signals or even 720p it's almost unrecognizable compared to what the brain used to comprehend it as before. It had been heightened by technology. So this might give us a clue on how consciousness works

`Consciousness is every(where)ness, expressed locally´, in: IPI Letters, Feb. 2024, downloadable

In order to really understand if “consciousness” is solely a subjective phenomena experienced at separate and distinct points in time vs. being an objective phenomena shared by all all beings who have attained consciousness, we must do scientific experiments to determine where ideas come from. When an idea or thought enters your conscious mind, is it solely the culmination of biology, chemistry and physics or is there some type of external input. Maybe we haven’t invented the technology to measure consciousness yet….just like we needed to invent electron microscopes to see molecules.

I'm afraid to even get close to this question.

People should know where their expertise end. Just because someone sells books about quantum and many worlds, doesn't mean they are expert in every topic or are capable of making intelligent arguments.
Sean is talking totally nonsense here and his arguments are nothing but fallacy and logically totally wrong. Sad part is that he come off as arrogant, playing the role of the guy with all the answers. I guess that's part of his persona and marketing strategy. But conscious zombies ? Uploaded Sean is the same as tomorrow Sean ? Really ? 😂

Daniel Dennett has been shown a fraud. CBT is a farce. No account for any level of The Unconscious. The interviewer is a small-minded, narrow egotist.

One simple thought experiment that came to my mind years ago, which resulted in me giving up chasing consciousness within causal deterministic or computational systems was this… Let’s assume the brain is a causal, computational system. Now, let’s get a pen and paper and start computing exactly what the brain was executing at the time of me feeling great pain, happiness or anger. As I compute the algorithm execution with my pen and paper, is it the pen or the paper that “experiences” the emotion? The substrate of a computation that is causal and deterministic shouldn’t impact the outcome of the algorithm; as such the motions carried out during the algorithm shouldn’t have impact or results produced outside the material substrate either, so what’s going on? To elaborate, many say consciousness is an illusion; so going off this path, a causal deterministic algorithm is executed, yet something independent of that material substrate “experiences” the effects of that computation without being able to impact it. This assumes that this something is capable of “experiencing” to begin with, yet it has no place within the material substrate itself. Its existence is pointless within the framework of this line of thought and the only evidence we have of its existence is that we ourselves are not zombies or robots.

It is very simple If you make a copy of your brain and make identical copy of environment / bosons, fermions, dark matter etc / you have the same interaction of your brain to same envronment, if law of physics we know are aplicable to those instances of our brain. If we place copy of our brain beside our barin in our environment, results will be different. There will be interaction not only brain environemnt, but also brain_0 to brain_1. And if resources for survival would be sufficient only for one brain / energy to survive / brain_0 will try to kill brain_1. This is the law of nature, to take resources from environment to prolong existence of brain_x or y.

I think Sean is guilty of a bit of "bait and switch" here. It seems to me that the category of "Basketball" can in principal , be reduced to a description of molecules without the need to introduce any additional concepts or bridging terms. As pointed out, you wouldn't want to do that : it doesn't appear tractable or useful to provide a description of a game of basketball in molecular terms. However, there's not a conceptual gap to providing such a description. By contrast, providing a molecular description of the experience of red (or any qualia) does seem to require tackling head-on an apparent conceptual gap that doesn't seem present in the first case. Sean doesn't engage with this point ? Left me wondering what Sean's reponse to the thought experiment of "Mary the colourblind neuroscientist" would be.

Also, Sean saying consciousness is mearly a description of the world looks an oddly loose way of framing things. It seems truer to how things are to view qualia as having a distinct ontological status - not merely as a second-order description of something that is ontologically present in reality. His description just doesn't ring true to the phenomenology.

When you talk about copying people they get confused about who they are, but the issue is confusion about Time, not Identity: people have no confusion when they think about TIME TRAVEL- If you travel back in time one hour and meet yourself, most people understand and accept that both people are you!

It has been said that science exists because of one’s awareness. Absent the awareness of science, it wouldn’t exist or maybe wouldn’t be important is a better way to say this. Awareness of consciousness supersedes scientific explanation. Nonetheless, the study of science produces understanding that can result in invention through manipulation of matter and energy to produce useful objects. Science is useful because of one’s awareness of this.

Jean nailed the conscious wooo woo in my opinion and in the opinion.. it’s clearly an evolutionary advantage ( and as many evolutionary advantages also have not so good side effects) .. I have no portion thinking I’m different from yesterday and still a evolution of me

The waitress comes over and says: "ok, I'ma have to ask you to leave"

Sean is a wonderful talker - though he is so middle-of-the-road main-stream - it's almost he's scared to step outside of the middle of that road.

"Shoot me in the head, and I can't go on like this." Christopher Hitchens. It's really that simple.

Awareness is known by awareness alone.

Consciousness is fundamental. That is self-evident. Radical physicalism or no, without conscious agents there is no perception or perceiver to describe or defend radical physicalism.

The Star Trek Teletransporter Hard Problem