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Curt Jaimungal (Me): How Deep Does Consciousness Go? | Iceberg of Consciousness Layer 5
January 17, 2025
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
Think Verizon, the best 5G network, is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plants.
So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal.
Welcome back to the consciousness iceberg. We've journeyed from the sunlit surface of the basic definitions in layer one through the heart problem and non-dualism in layer two into the obscure theories of layer three where we tackled Heidegger's Dasein and attention schema theory
In the previous layer, layer 4, we explored the radical ideas of thinkers like Douglas Hofstadter's strange loops, Penrose's theory of quantum consciousness, Christopher Langan's CTMU, John Joe McFadden's conscious electromagnetic information field theory, David Chalmers' extended mind hypothesis, and
Now, as we descend into Layer 5, we encounter some of the most profound and challenging concepts yet. In this layer lies Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism, a consciousness-only ontology. We'll then explore Karl Friston's free energy principle and its implications for understanding consciousness as a process
of active inference. Next, speaking of process, we venture into process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and his pan-experientialism, which is a view that sees experience as fundamental to reality itself. We'll also examine Mark Solm's groundbreaking work on affective neuroscience and his felt uncertainty principle, which places feelings, valences, technically, at the very heart of consciousness.
Finally, we grapple with Thomas Metzinger's Minimal Phenomenal Selfhood, a theory that deconstructs the self into its most basic components. My name is Kurt Jaimungal, and on this channel, Theories of Everything, I explore mathematical physics and philosophy, bridging these seemingly disparate subjects to make abstract concepts digestible, while not skimping on nor being afraid of the rigor. Let's begin Layer 5. Bernardo Castrop's Analytic Idealism
Bernardo Kastrup champions analytic idealism, a consciousness only ontology. But what does this mean? It asserts that phenomenal consciousness is fundamental and everything else in nature, including the physical world, is ultimately, quote unquote, reducible to patterns of excitations within this fundamental consciousness. Most people tend to think of consciousness as emanating from the universe. But to Kastrup, the universe isn't some giant machine that somehow produces consciousness. No, no.
Consciousness is the fundamental reality. The physical universe is rather some sort of projection or manifestation of it. You can view Kastrup's PhD defense online as he's one of the few people in this field who has filmed his and made it public. He argues for his position analytically and rigorously. You'll notice the usage of the term dissociated alters to describe individual consciousnesses like ours.
We're like islands surrounded by the ocean of cosmic consciousness. Our individual experiences come about from dissociation from this larger field, which he calls mind at large, and also through the interaction of these altars within this larger field.
Crucially, Kastrup insists on the existence of an external world. Now, this is a common criticism or misinterpretation of Kastrup's work. He's not an anti-realist. He believes objective reality does exist beyond individual minds, but this external world itself is mental in nature. It consists of external mental states, just as our mind consists of internal mental states.
The physical world as we perceive it isn't an independent reality, but rather what external mental states look like from across what he calls a dissociative boundary. This dashboard representation, what we call matter, is analogous to what neuroscientists observe when they study the brain, a representation of mental states, but not their source.
How does this relate to other theories we've discussed? Remember Donald Hoffman's interface theory? Hoffman argues that our perceptions are like icons on a computer screen. They're so-called useful illusions. They're not vertical representations of reality. While Castrop goes further, he says there's no computer, there's no screen, there's no independent reality behind the interface. Everything, including the headset itself that Hoffman refers to, is made of conscious states. It's all consciousness.
But what about all the neuroscientific evidence correlating brain activity with mental states? Well, Kastrup says these correlations exist, but the causation just goes in the other direction. Brain activity doesn't cause experience. It's rather experience causes brain activity. The brain is a sort of image or projection of consciousness. It's not its source.
In this sense, the brain and body are what our internal mental states look like, when observed from an external perspective. You'll also notice this emphasis on perspectives, much like Nir LaHav's theory of relativistic consciousness, which we discussed in the previous layer. Now, what are the criticisms? Many argue that Kastrup's idealism is untestable, it's unfalsifiable. Well, how could you prove or disprove that the physical world is just a projection of consciousness?
It's a valid criticism, but Kastrup argues that his theory is more parsimonious than materialism. It avoids the hard problem entirely.
It doesn't need to explain how physical processes come about to give consciousness because consciousness is the starting point. In other words, Kastrup may say, fair point, but your pet philosophy suffers from the same problems and often even more egregious problems to boot. Another criticism is the decomposition problem. How does seemingly distinct individual consciousnesses come about from a single unified field of consciousness?
Castrop addresses this by suggesting again that the individual consciousnesses are just dissociated alters within the larger field.
I've spoken to Kastrup at length several times on this podcast, one four hour solo podcast that goes in depth into his analytic idealism that's on screen here, and then several others which are theolocutions, that is having Bernardo paired up with someone else where they riff off of one another and build each other's theories up as well as constructively criticize one another in real time. Links on screen and in the description. Carl Friston's inactive approach slash inference.
Carl Friston is also someone that I've spoken to at length several different times on this podcast. You'll see one solo here, another lecture here, another solo one here, another few theolocutions here. Carl is the world's most cited neuroscientist, and he approaches consciousness through the lens of the free energy principle.
Importantly, actually, this isn't a theory of consciousness per se. Actually, I sent this script to Carl prior to reading it out to you here and editing it. He sent me back an email saying, upon fact-checking the below attributions with Professor Carl Friston, he smiled about the veracity of filling his pipe, but then reminded Kurt that the free energy principle is not a theory of consciousness. This has the profound benefit of being applicable to everyone else's theories of consciousness, almost.
That pipe reference is a reference to something that comes up later in the script. Moving on, this principle states that all biological systems including brains strive to minimize surprise. They do this by building internal models of the world that predict sensory input. Consciousness in this view is an evolved mechanism for simulating scenarios and minimizing prediction errors. It's not a thing but a process of active inference.
Now, speaking of processes, I just finished speaking with Matt Siegel on the process theory of Whitehead. Again, that's quite a technical podcast. And if you'd like to know more about the history of philosophy leading up to and even after Whitehead, I recommend you check that out. Link on screen and in the description. Now, how does Karl's theory relate to the inactive approach that we discussed earlier?
Remember Alva Noah's idea that consciousness is out of our heads. Both of them emphasize the active role of the organism in shaping its experience. Consciousness isn't something that happens to us. It's something that we do. However, Carl goes further than Alva, formalizing this active engagement mathematically, using the concept of free energy to quantify the difference between predicted and actual sensory input. He argues that the brain constantly works to minimize this free energy, thus reducing surprise.
How does this compare to other theories? Consider global workspace theory. Both see consciousness as a process of information integration. However, GWT focuses on the broadcasting of this information within the brain, while Friston, and his free energy principle, emphasizes the predictive nature of this integration. Okay, what about the criticisms?
Some argue that Friston's theory is far too abstract and too mathematical. It doesn't explain what it's like to be conscious. It focuses on the function of consciousness, not its phenomenology.
Now, this is a valid criticism, one that Friston agrees with, but he also points out that free energy minimization is not just something for understanding consciousness, but various other fields like understanding life itself, or robotics, so it has an empirical basis. Another criticism is that the free energy principle doesn't address the hard problem. How does minimizing surprise create subjective experience? Again, Carl Friston would indeed say that's a fair point,
He would then pour tobacco in a pipe and say that actually the hard problem is a pseudo problem fomented from a misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness.
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Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher and mathematician, developed a process-oriented metaphysics he calls the philosophy of organism. This is something we discuss at length, again with Matt Siegel, and the link to that conversation is in the description. I recommend you check it out because it serves as a comprehensive introduction to process philosophy. To Whitehead, reality is made of concrete processes, or sometimes pronounced processes for whatever reason, of becoming, that he referred to as actual occasions of experience.
His ontology has been described as pan-experientialism, that is, the view that all self-organizing beings, including photons and electrons, realize some degree of experience, albeit extremely rudimentary in most cases.
It's not that your coffee mug is thinking. It's just that it's an enduring form that's composed and recomposed moment by moment by mutually quote unquote, pre-hensive or feeling occasions of experience. There's so many new pieces of terminology here, so let's define some of them. Pre-hension refers to the capacity of an actual occasion to internally relate to and incorporate aspects of other actualities in its past environment.
as well as possibilities that are not present in the existing environments and these are called conceptual prehensions. Now let's think about an electron interacting with particles in its environment. In Whitehead's framework, the electron prehens the electromagnetic field around it. Now this doesn't mean that the electron is necessarily conscious, it just feels or responds to the presence of other charges and fields
integrating this information into its behavior, such as determining its trajectory. Now, how does this relate to panpsychism? Both see experience as fundamental to reality. But Whitehead's pan-experientialism is different. He doesn't like to think about things having experience. He prefers to think about events or occasions of experience. Reality isn't made up of those substances you heard about in the previous layers, referring to Descartes in particular, with these intrinsic properties.
To Whitehead, you have a dynamic process of events pre-hending other events. This process avoids some of the traditional problems of panpsychism. Recall that combination problem. That is, how is it that these tiny bits of consciousness combine to form a unified experience? Well, Whitehead's pan-experientialism sidesteps this completely by focusing on the processes of concrescence, another new term. That is, the coming together
What about the criticisms?
Some argue that Whitehead's philosophy is too abstract, it's too metaphysical. I argue that it introduces too many unfamiliar terms, as is evident probably by you pausing and searching these terms and checking the transcript or just leaving the video entirely. I understand that. But I also understand that when someone's trying to put forward a new Weltanschauung, that they need to invent new language, bespoke language, because they have to train you, or the person reading, to understand their point of view.
which is unfamiliar in territory. You wouldn't get mad at some city in Mexico for having different street names compared to those in Manhattan. You need those different street names to signify different places. Now, another criticism is that it's difficult to connect to empirical science and that's a valid criticism. However, Whitehead would argue that his philosophy is based on a generalization from the findings of the special empirical sciences while also aiming for a more comprehensive understanding of reality than natural science alone can offer.
Science is written and described in a language, and it's in this language that we disprove or prove or provide evidence for so-and-so. But the language itself isn't validated or invalidated. It's rather just assumed. And we then think of the validity of the language as how well the conclusions of whatever there's evidence for or against make intuitive sense to us, as well as internal consistency conditions. Whitehead would say that metaphysics is an experiment upon the instrument of language itself.
and that his language is a more adequate one than the traditional substance-based or materialistic ways of thinking. Another criticism is that pan-experientialism doesn't explain what it's like to be conscious. It rather focuses on the structure of experience and less so on its phenomenology. This, though, is something we do explore with Matt Segal, so again, click the link in the description, check it out.
Mark Solms, a neuropsychoanalyst, posits that affect is the bedrock of consciousness. Now affect is a fancy word for feeling, but what Mark means by this is valence, qualia, and action. And by valence, qualia, and action, he means firstly valence is the intrinsic positivity or negativity of a feeling.
Affect inherently signals whether something is good or bad for the organism, so pleasure or pain, for instance. Qualia, on the other hand, is the subjective first-person experience of feelings.
The affect here is the raw, phenomenal aspect of consciousness, what it feels like to be in a certain emotional state. Action, on the other hand, is the motivational component to affect, feeling the drive, something compelling the organism toward actions that address homeostatic imbalances or fulfills needs, like seeking food, escaping danger.
Mark grounds the assertion that affect is foundational to consciousness by suggesting that feelings are fundamental to how organisms navigate an unpredictable world. Solms locates the physiological mechanism for affect in the upper brainstem, proposing that decreases and increases in expected uncertainty are felt as pleasure and unpleasure, respectively. This, he argues, is a more primal form of homeostasis.
Now, Psalms' theory resonates with Antonio de Masio's work on homeostatic feelings. Both emphasize the role of feelings in life regulation. However, Psalms goes further than de Masio by stating that affect constitutes the foundational form of consciousness. He's always going on about what he calls the cortical fallacy. That is, that only us more evolved creatures possess
Consciousness. Mark, by the way, is pointing out that it's a fallacy. He's not agreeing with the premise. He's pointing out that the premise is false. So instead, Mark places the seat of consciousness in a more ancient part of the brain, extending consciousness to a broader range of species that otherwise or usually are neglected with the cortical focus. He contends that sentient subjectivity in its most rudimentary form is inextricably linked to affect. This theory contrasts with Graziano's attention schema theory,
Which posits that consciousness comes about from the brain's model of its own attention. While some emphasizes the feeling aspect, Graziano is the one who's highlighting the attentional mechanism. But for Psalms, the feeling of thirst is a direct manifestation of a physiological need, a core component of conscious experience.
This feeling motivates the organism to seek water to ensure survival, for instance. Whereas for Graziano, the conscious experience of thirst is just a consequence of the brain modeling its attention to the body's dehydrated state. Solm also introduces an intriguing idea, drawing a parallel with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Solm suggests that the act of thinking about a feeling inevitably changes the feeling itself,
super interesting just as observing a quantum particle alters its state. Solms argues that the cognition is rendered conscious through the quote-unquote feeling of associated cognitions projected onto the cortex from the upper brain stem. For instance, the grief that you feel when you think about a lost loved one can morph into a dull ache when analyzed intellectually. The very act of introspection alters the feeling itself. Now, what are the criticisms?
Some may contend that Psalms' focus on affect is too narrow. Does that fully account for the complexity, for this richness that we have of conscious experience, including all the thoughts, the perceptions, the memories we have? Again, that's a valid concern. Psalms would counter, though, by saying that these other aspects of consciousness are built upon a foundation of affect. Others would challenge Marx' reliance on the free energy principle. Does minimizing surprise
Thomas Metzinger's Minimal Phenomenal Selfhood Thomas Metzinger
A philosopher offers a representationalist and functionalist account of subjectivity. He argues that what we commonly call the self is an illusion, surprise surprise, a construct of the brain. There's no little quote unquote me inside our heads pulling the levers of consciousness. Instead, there's a phenomenal self-model, a PSM, a representation of the organism as a whole that we experience as real. This self-model, Metzinger contends,
is transparent. We don't experience it as a model, we experience it as ourselves. We look through it, not at it. This is also an analogy that John Vervecky makes when taking off his glasses, saying that meditation allows you to inspect what you traditionally are looking through. Metzinger's theory resonates with Buddhist philosophy, which also emphasizes the illusory nature of the self, as well as his focus and research on the experience of pure consciousness, or contentless wakefulness.
Both go against the notion of a permanent unchanging ego. However, Metzinger's approach is more grounded in cognitive science, not a spiritual tradition. Metzinger uses the tools of neuroscience and philosophy to dissect the self-model and reveal its underlying mechanisms. By the way, thank you to Tevin Naidu for helping me with this section of Metzinger and the previous one of Psalms.
As a side note, since Graziano was mentioned earlier, it's worth noting that Thomas refers to the attention schema as the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation.
There's also interesting work exploring his epistemic agent model, EAM, and how it may link to both Graziano's attention schema theory and Friston's free energy principle. For instance, a paper whose full title escapes me, but it was something like self-modeling epistemic spaces from approximately 2020 delves into these connections. This perspective contrasts sharply with theories like Carl Jung, which posits that there is a collective unconscious and archetypes.
Thomas Metzinger's focus is on the individual brain, not some universal reservoir of psychic energy. He sees the self model as a product of individual experience and neural processing. Now, this diverges from embodied cognition theories, which emphasize the role of the body and its interaction with the world in shaping the mind. While Metzinger acknowledges the importance of the body and its representation in the PSM, embodied cognition theorists argue that the self extends beyond the brain,
incorporating the body and its environment in a more fundamental manner. For Metzinger, the feeling of being quote unquote me is primarily a consequence of the brain's self model. For an embodied cognition theorist, however, this feeling of quote unquote being me comes about from the interaction of the body with its surrounding, the sense of agency derived from physical actions and their interactions.
Metzinger also introduces the concept of minimal phenomenal selfhood, MPS, there's some more jargon, the most basic form of self-awareness. He argues that this minimal selfhood comes about from the integration of sensory information and bodily awareness into a coherent first-person perspective. It's that feeling of being a distinct identity, distinctly located in space, distinctly located at some place in time, an entity that has experience.
For instance, the simple awareness of your hand resting on the table. That's a tactile sensation and it's different than visual perception. And that constitutes a basic form of self-awareness, a minimal phenomenal self. It's the feeling of your hand, which is different than the table and different than the rest of the world. Okay, so what are the criticisms? Some argue that Thomas Messinger's theory is too deflationary.
Does it actually account for the richness and depth of our subjective experience of self? Now, that's a legitimate question. Again, Metzinger would probably counter that his theory is revealing the true nature of the self by deconstructing the illusion. He's not eliminating the experience. Now, others may say that, okay, the self is an illusion. Does that mean that our sense of agency and responsibility and personal identity is also illusory? Now, this is a weighty question.
One that we've explored at length on this channel. You can see this interview with Robert Sapolsky on Free Will, where I counter Robert by bringing up mathematician Raymond Smullian and Scott Aronson from Complexity Theory. But anyhow, Metzinger would respond by suggesting that these concepts are still meaningful and functional, importantly, even if they're based on a self-model and not a metaphysical self.
So that's the difference. Metzinger argues that the phenomenal self-model creates a phenomenal property of mindness, like mine, this is mine, and that's sufficient for ethical and practical purposes. Now, a further criticism could target the concept of minimal phenomenal selfhood. Is it truly the most basic form of self-awareness?
Is there something even more fundamental? Something like a pre-reflective bodily awareness that precedes this minimal phenomenal selfhood? Well, we don't know, but from Whitehead's process metaphysics to Metzinger's self-model theory, from Kastrup's analytic idealism to Solm's affect-based framework, and from Freston's free energy principle, each of these perspectives gives a different aspect of consciousness and reality.
Now, they all differ in their foundations and methodology, but they all share commitment to rigorously addressing the deepest questions about the mind, about self, and existence. These theories demonstrate that the exploration of consciousness may remain one of humanity's most profound intellectual endeavors, sure, bridging philosophy and neuroscience and human experience,
But it also may just remain a mystery, one that we can't agree if it's being solved because we don't even agree on the definition. New update! Start at a substack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details.
Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey, Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also,
Thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm,
which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook, or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything, where people explicate toes, they disagree respectfully about theories, and build as a community our own toe.
Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts. I also read in the comments that, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on those platforms like iTunes, Spotify,
on YouTube.
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"text": " It's a valid criticism, but Kastrup argues that his theory is more parsimonious than materialism. It avoids the hard problem entirely."
},
{
"end_time": 433.677,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 409.036,
"text": " It doesn't need to explain how physical processes come about to give consciousness because consciousness is the starting point. In other words, Kastrup may say, fair point, but your pet philosophy suffers from the same problems and often even more egregious problems to boot. Another criticism is the decomposition problem. How does seemingly distinct individual consciousnesses come about from a single unified field of consciousness?"
},
{
"end_time": 441.425,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 433.677,
"text": " Castrop addresses this by suggesting again that the individual consciousnesses are just dissociated alters within the larger field."
},
{
"end_time": 468.268,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 441.937,
"text": " I've spoken to Kastrup at length several times on this podcast, one four hour solo podcast that goes in depth into his analytic idealism that's on screen here, and then several others which are theolocutions, that is having Bernardo paired up with someone else where they riff off of one another and build each other's theories up as well as constructively criticize one another in real time. Links on screen and in the description. Carl Friston's inactive approach slash inference."
},
{
"end_time": 487.346,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 469.002,
"text": " Carl Friston is also someone that I've spoken to at length several different times on this podcast. You'll see one solo here, another lecture here, another solo one here, another few theolocutions here. Carl is the world's most cited neuroscientist, and he approaches consciousness through the lens of the free energy principle."
},
{
"end_time": 514.292,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 487.346,
"text": " Importantly, actually, this isn't a theory of consciousness per se. Actually, I sent this script to Carl prior to reading it out to you here and editing it. He sent me back an email saying, upon fact-checking the below attributions with Professor Carl Friston, he smiled about the veracity of filling his pipe, but then reminded Kurt that the free energy principle is not a theory of consciousness. This has the profound benefit of being applicable to everyone else's theories of consciousness, almost."
},
{
"end_time": 540.435,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 514.292,
"text": " That pipe reference is a reference to something that comes up later in the script. Moving on, this principle states that all biological systems including brains strive to minimize surprise. They do this by building internal models of the world that predict sensory input. Consciousness in this view is an evolved mechanism for simulating scenarios and minimizing prediction errors. It's not a thing but a process of active inference."
},
{
"end_time": 560.947,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 540.435,
"text": " Now, speaking of processes, I just finished speaking with Matt Siegel on the process theory of Whitehead. Again, that's quite a technical podcast. And if you'd like to know more about the history of philosophy leading up to and even after Whitehead, I recommend you check that out. Link on screen and in the description. Now, how does Karl's theory relate to the inactive approach that we discussed earlier?"
},
{
"end_time": 590.128,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 561.425,
"text": " Remember Alva Noah's idea that consciousness is out of our heads. Both of them emphasize the active role of the organism in shaping its experience. Consciousness isn't something that happens to us. It's something that we do. However, Carl goes further than Alva, formalizing this active engagement mathematically, using the concept of free energy to quantify the difference between predicted and actual sensory input. He argues that the brain constantly works to minimize this free energy, thus reducing surprise."
},
{
"end_time": 612.995,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 590.555,
"text": " How does this compare to other theories? Consider global workspace theory. Both see consciousness as a process of information integration. However, GWT focuses on the broadcasting of this information within the brain, while Friston, and his free energy principle, emphasizes the predictive nature of this integration. Okay, what about the criticisms?"
},
{
"end_time": 625.213,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 613.473,
"text": " Some argue that Friston's theory is far too abstract and too mathematical. It doesn't explain what it's like to be conscious. It focuses on the function of consciousness, not its phenomenology."
},
{
"end_time": 652.244,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 625.572,
"text": " Now, this is a valid criticism, one that Friston agrees with, but he also points out that free energy minimization is not just something for understanding consciousness, but various other fields like understanding life itself, or robotics, so it has an empirical basis. Another criticism is that the free energy principle doesn't address the hard problem. How does minimizing surprise create subjective experience? Again, Carl Friston would indeed say that's a fair point,"
},
{
"end_time": 669.121,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 652.619,
"text": " He would then pour tobacco in a pipe and say that actually the hard problem is a pseudo problem fomented from a misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 686.22,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 669.497,
"text": " Football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections."
},
{
"end_time": 701.578,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 686.22,
"text": " Anything from touchdown to threes and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 731.22,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 701.834,
"text": " With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim."
},
{
"end_time": 756.51,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 733.183,
"text": " Check out a pop-up art show or even try those limited edition donuts. Because why not? TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes payday unexpectedly human. Alfred North Whitehead's pan-experientialism."
},
{
"end_time": 785.862,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 757.756,
"text": " Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher and mathematician, developed a process-oriented metaphysics he calls the philosophy of organism. This is something we discuss at length, again with Matt Siegel, and the link to that conversation is in the description. I recommend you check it out because it serves as a comprehensive introduction to process philosophy. To Whitehead, reality is made of concrete processes, or sometimes pronounced processes for whatever reason, of becoming, that he referred to as actual occasions of experience."
},
{
"end_time": 802.005,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 786.357,
"text": " His ontology has been described as pan-experientialism, that is, the view that all self-organizing beings, including photons and electrons, realize some degree of experience, albeit extremely rudimentary in most cases."
},
{
"end_time": 831.237,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 802.398,
"text": " It's not that your coffee mug is thinking. It's just that it's an enduring form that's composed and recomposed moment by moment by mutually quote unquote, pre-hensive or feeling occasions of experience. There's so many new pieces of terminology here, so let's define some of them. Pre-hension refers to the capacity of an actual occasion to internally relate to and incorporate aspects of other actualities in its past environment."
},
{
"end_time": 857.688,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 834.036,
"text": " as well as possibilities that are not present in the existing environments and these are called conceptual prehensions. Now let's think about an electron interacting with particles in its environment. In Whitehead's framework, the electron prehens the electromagnetic field around it. Now this doesn't mean that the electron is necessarily conscious, it just feels or responds to the presence of other charges and fields"
},
{
"end_time": 887.858,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 857.892,
"text": " integrating this information into its behavior, such as determining its trajectory. Now, how does this relate to panpsychism? Both see experience as fundamental to reality. But Whitehead's pan-experientialism is different. He doesn't like to think about things having experience. He prefers to think about events or occasions of experience. Reality isn't made up of those substances you heard about in the previous layers, referring to Descartes in particular, with these intrinsic properties."
},
{
"end_time": 918.012,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 888.285,
"text": " To Whitehead, you have a dynamic process of events pre-hending other events. This process avoids some of the traditional problems of panpsychism. Recall that combination problem. That is, how is it that these tiny bits of consciousness combine to form a unified experience? Well, Whitehead's pan-experientialism sidesteps this completely by focusing on the processes of concrescence, another new term. That is, the coming together"
},
{
"end_time": 924.838,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 918.234,
"text": " What about the criticisms?"
},
{
"end_time": 953.541,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 925.145,
"text": " Some argue that Whitehead's philosophy is too abstract, it's too metaphysical. I argue that it introduces too many unfamiliar terms, as is evident probably by you pausing and searching these terms and checking the transcript or just leaving the video entirely. I understand that. But I also understand that when someone's trying to put forward a new Weltanschauung, that they need to invent new language, bespoke language, because they have to train you, or the person reading, to understand their point of view."
},
{
"end_time": 982.449,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 953.695,
"text": " which is unfamiliar in territory. You wouldn't get mad at some city in Mexico for having different street names compared to those in Manhattan. You need those different street names to signify different places. Now, another criticism is that it's difficult to connect to empirical science and that's a valid criticism. However, Whitehead would argue that his philosophy is based on a generalization from the findings of the special empirical sciences while also aiming for a more comprehensive understanding of reality than natural science alone can offer."
},
{
"end_time": 1012.176,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 982.739,
"text": " Science is written and described in a language, and it's in this language that we disprove or prove or provide evidence for so-and-so. But the language itself isn't validated or invalidated. It's rather just assumed. And we then think of the validity of the language as how well the conclusions of whatever there's evidence for or against make intuitive sense to us, as well as internal consistency conditions. Whitehead would say that metaphysics is an experiment upon the instrument of language itself."
},
{
"end_time": 1042.329,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1012.551,
"text": " and that his language is a more adequate one than the traditional substance-based or materialistic ways of thinking. Another criticism is that pan-experientialism doesn't explain what it's like to be conscious. It rather focuses on the structure of experience and less so on its phenomenology. This, though, is something we do explore with Matt Segal, so again, click the link in the description, check it out."
},
{
"end_time": 1062.688,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1043.166,
"text": " Mark Solms, a neuropsychoanalyst, posits that affect is the bedrock of consciousness. Now affect is a fancy word for feeling, but what Mark means by this is valence, qualia, and action. And by valence, qualia, and action, he means firstly valence is the intrinsic positivity or negativity of a feeling."
},
{
"end_time": 1074.445,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1062.995,
"text": " Affect inherently signals whether something is good or bad for the organism, so pleasure or pain, for instance. Qualia, on the other hand, is the subjective first-person experience of feelings."
},
{
"end_time": 1095.896,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1074.889,
"text": " The affect here is the raw, phenomenal aspect of consciousness, what it feels like to be in a certain emotional state. Action, on the other hand, is the motivational component to affect, feeling the drive, something compelling the organism toward actions that address homeostatic imbalances or fulfills needs, like seeking food, escaping danger."
},
{
"end_time": 1119.906,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1095.896,
"text": " Mark grounds the assertion that affect is foundational to consciousness by suggesting that feelings are fundamental to how organisms navigate an unpredictable world. Solms locates the physiological mechanism for affect in the upper brainstem, proposing that decreases and increases in expected uncertainty are felt as pleasure and unpleasure, respectively. This, he argues, is a more primal form of homeostasis."
},
{
"end_time": 1142.637,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1120.179,
"text": " Now, Psalms' theory resonates with Antonio de Masio's work on homeostatic feelings. Both emphasize the role of feelings in life regulation. However, Psalms goes further than de Masio by stating that affect constitutes the foundational form of consciousness. He's always going on about what he calls the cortical fallacy. That is, that only us more evolved creatures possess"
},
{
"end_time": 1171.8,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1142.807,
"text": " Consciousness. Mark, by the way, is pointing out that it's a fallacy. He's not agreeing with the premise. He's pointing out that the premise is false. So instead, Mark places the seat of consciousness in a more ancient part of the brain, extending consciousness to a broader range of species that otherwise or usually are neglected with the cortical focus. He contends that sentient subjectivity in its most rudimentary form is inextricably linked to affect. This theory contrasts with Graziano's attention schema theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 1192.21,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1172.09,
"text": " Which posits that consciousness comes about from the brain's model of its own attention. While some emphasizes the feeling aspect, Graziano is the one who's highlighting the attentional mechanism. But for Psalms, the feeling of thirst is a direct manifestation of a physiological need, a core component of conscious experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1220.503,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1192.722,
"text": " This feeling motivates the organism to seek water to ensure survival, for instance. Whereas for Graziano, the conscious experience of thirst is just a consequence of the brain modeling its attention to the body's dehydrated state. Solm also introduces an intriguing idea, drawing a parallel with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Solm suggests that the act of thinking about a feeling inevitably changes the feeling itself,"
},
{
"end_time": 1249.94,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1220.93,
"text": " super interesting just as observing a quantum particle alters its state. Solms argues that the cognition is rendered conscious through the quote-unquote feeling of associated cognitions projected onto the cortex from the upper brain stem. For instance, the grief that you feel when you think about a lost loved one can morph into a dull ache when analyzed intellectually. The very act of introspection alters the feeling itself. Now, what are the criticisms?"
},
{
"end_time": 1277.807,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1250.247,
"text": " Some may contend that Psalms' focus on affect is too narrow. Does that fully account for the complexity, for this richness that we have of conscious experience, including all the thoughts, the perceptions, the memories we have? Again, that's a valid concern. Psalms would counter, though, by saying that these other aspects of consciousness are built upon a foundation of affect. Others would challenge Marx' reliance on the free energy principle. Does minimizing surprise"
},
{
"end_time": 1307.398,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1278.046,
"text": " Thomas Metzinger's Minimal Phenomenal Selfhood Thomas Metzinger"
},
{
"end_time": 1333.524,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1307.602,
"text": " A philosopher offers a representationalist and functionalist account of subjectivity. He argues that what we commonly call the self is an illusion, surprise surprise, a construct of the brain. There's no little quote unquote me inside our heads pulling the levers of consciousness. Instead, there's a phenomenal self-model, a PSM, a representation of the organism as a whole that we experience as real. This self-model, Metzinger contends,"
},
{
"end_time": 1363.148,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1333.712,
"text": " is transparent. We don't experience it as a model, we experience it as ourselves. We look through it, not at it. This is also an analogy that John Vervecky makes when taking off his glasses, saying that meditation allows you to inspect what you traditionally are looking through. Metzinger's theory resonates with Buddhist philosophy, which also emphasizes the illusory nature of the self, as well as his focus and research on the experience of pure consciousness, or contentless wakefulness."
},
{
"end_time": 1385.367,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1363.746,
"text": " Both go against the notion of a permanent unchanging ego. However, Metzinger's approach is more grounded in cognitive science, not a spiritual tradition. Metzinger uses the tools of neuroscience and philosophy to dissect the self-model and reveal its underlying mechanisms. By the way, thank you to Tevin Naidu for helping me with this section of Metzinger and the previous one of Psalms."
},
{
"end_time": 1410.776,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1385.657,
"text": " As a side note, since Graziano was mentioned earlier, it's worth noting that Thomas refers to the attention schema as the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation."
},
{
"end_time": 1439.701,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1411.254,
"text": " There's also interesting work exploring his epistemic agent model, EAM, and how it may link to both Graziano's attention schema theory and Friston's free energy principle. For instance, a paper whose full title escapes me, but it was something like self-modeling epistemic spaces from approximately 2020 delves into these connections. This perspective contrasts sharply with theories like Carl Jung, which posits that there is a collective unconscious and archetypes."
},
{
"end_time": 1470.009,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1440.043,
"text": " Thomas Metzinger's focus is on the individual brain, not some universal reservoir of psychic energy. He sees the self model as a product of individual experience and neural processing. Now, this diverges from embodied cognition theories, which emphasize the role of the body and its interaction with the world in shaping the mind. While Metzinger acknowledges the importance of the body and its representation in the PSM, embodied cognition theorists argue that the self extends beyond the brain,"
},
{
"end_time": 1495.213,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1470.299,
"text": " incorporating the body and its environment in a more fundamental manner. For Metzinger, the feeling of being quote unquote me is primarily a consequence of the brain's self model. For an embodied cognition theorist, however, this feeling of quote unquote being me comes about from the interaction of the body with its surrounding, the sense of agency derived from physical actions and their interactions."
},
{
"end_time": 1523.985,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1495.469,
"text": " Metzinger also introduces the concept of minimal phenomenal selfhood, MPS, there's some more jargon, the most basic form of self-awareness. He argues that this minimal selfhood comes about from the integration of sensory information and bodily awareness into a coherent first-person perspective. It's that feeling of being a distinct identity, distinctly located in space, distinctly located at some place in time, an entity that has experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1549.684,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1524.292,
"text": " For instance, the simple awareness of your hand resting on the table. That's a tactile sensation and it's different than visual perception. And that constitutes a basic form of self-awareness, a minimal phenomenal self. It's the feeling of your hand, which is different than the table and different than the rest of the world. Okay, so what are the criticisms? Some argue that Thomas Messinger's theory is too deflationary."
},
{
"end_time": 1576.596,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1550.23,
"text": " Does it actually account for the richness and depth of our subjective experience of self? Now, that's a legitimate question. Again, Metzinger would probably counter that his theory is revealing the true nature of the self by deconstructing the illusion. He's not eliminating the experience. Now, others may say that, okay, the self is an illusion. Does that mean that our sense of agency and responsibility and personal identity is also illusory? Now, this is a weighty question."
},
{
"end_time": 1600.145,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1576.834,
"text": " One that we've explored at length on this channel. You can see this interview with Robert Sapolsky on Free Will, where I counter Robert by bringing up mathematician Raymond Smullian and Scott Aronson from Complexity Theory. But anyhow, Metzinger would respond by suggesting that these concepts are still meaningful and functional, importantly, even if they're based on a self-model and not a metaphysical self."
},
{
"end_time": 1620.64,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1600.316,
"text": " So that's the difference. Metzinger argues that the phenomenal self-model creates a phenomenal property of mindness, like mine, this is mine, and that's sufficient for ethical and practical purposes. Now, a further criticism could target the concept of minimal phenomenal selfhood. Is it truly the most basic form of self-awareness?"
},
{
"end_time": 1647.671,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1620.64,
"text": " Is there something even more fundamental? Something like a pre-reflective bodily awareness that precedes this minimal phenomenal selfhood? Well, we don't know, but from Whitehead's process metaphysics to Metzinger's self-model theory, from Kastrup's analytic idealism to Solm's affect-based framework, and from Freston's free energy principle, each of these perspectives gives a different aspect of consciousness and reality."
},
{
"end_time": 1672.176,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1648.217,
"text": " Now, they all differ in their foundations and methodology, but they all share commitment to rigorously addressing the deepest questions about the mind, about self, and existence. These theories demonstrate that the exploration of consciousness may remain one of humanity's most profound intellectual endeavors, sure, bridging philosophy and neuroscience and human experience,"
},
{
"end_time": 1688.797,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1672.551,
"text": " But it also may just remain a mystery, one that we can't agree if it's being solved because we don't even agree on the definition. New update! Start at a substack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details."
},
{
"end_time": 1717.193,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1689.019,
"text": " Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey, Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also,"
},
{
"end_time": 1744.514,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1717.363,
"text": " Thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm,"
},
{
"end_time": 1769.189,
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"text": " which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook, or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything, where people explicate toes, they disagree respectfully about theories, and build as a community our own toe."
},
{
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"text": " Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts. I also read in the comments that, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on those platforms like iTunes, Spotify,"
},
{
"end_time": 1816.271,
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"text": " on YouTube."
},
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"text": " You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much."
}
]
}No transcript available.