What Is Consciousness?

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consciousness is a term or concept that in one form or another, has been of great interest for thousands of years. Could you please give us a working definition of consciousness? Intuitively, your experiences. If you see a blue sky, it's the experience of the blue in some sense. And we have to ifyou hit your thumb with a tham hammeryou that feeling of pain, that's part of conscious experience. When you're in a deep sleep, dreamless sleep, that's when you don't have this conscious experience. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness.

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Donald Hoffman ( @donalddhoffman) received a PhD in computational psychology from MIT and is a Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is an author of over 120 scientific papers and three books, including The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences.

His writing has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, LA Review of Books, and Edge, and his work has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The Atlantic, Ars Technica, National Public Radio, Discover Magazine, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. His TED Talk, titled “Do We See Reality as It Is?,” has almost 4M views.

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What was the Helmholtz Club, and how did it spark a scientific exploration into the meaning of consciousness? [06:19]

What is consciousness? [11:24]

How should we understand our perceptions and their relationship to reality? David walks us through the desktop interface metaphor as presented in his 2015 TED Talk, and explains why it’s unlikely (with a probability of zero) that human beings evolved to behold the naked entirety of reality. [14:08]

Why does Donald, as a cognitive neuroscientist, find this era of physicists exploring consciousness and the nature of an underlying reality we haven’t evolved to see so exciting? Also: is spacetime doomed? [20:31]

Will science ever arrive at a theory of everything? [33:00]

What is the holographic model of the universe? [37:13]

What might things look like in the next decade or two as we begin to fundamentally revise how we think of reality, matter, and the interplay of consciousness? [43:09]

How does Donald scientifically explore the concept of conscious agents? [49:48]

Is consciousness localized, or does the brain “receive” it from elsewhere? [53:20]

How does Donald think about death? [58:55]

What are Markovian dynamics? [1:05:27]

Supplementary information that might help someone who’s struggling to understand parts of this conversation. [1:07:14]

What is panpsychism, and who are some of the most influential panpsychists? [1:08:38]

Which aspects of the way we interface with reality give us effective portals into life or consciousness? [1:12:11]

Probing the deeper reality suggested by the amplituhedron, associahedron, and cosmological polytope. [1:14:51]

At which hallowed institutions are these explorations of consciousness and the nature of a deeper reality being researched, and who is leading the charge? [1:20:18]

Donald’s thoughts on the use of hallucinogenic drugs to tap into deeper reality and interact with conscious agents. [1:21:22]

Exploring a theory involving portals and morphogenesis. [1:23:18]

It’s worth considering ethnobotanical and ethnographical studies that may give us more focused insight into consciousness through a non-Western lens and even have us questioning if plants can be considered a sentient part of this consciousness. [1:27:20]

On Chris Fuchs and the outer fringes of Quantum Bayesian — aka QBism. [1:35:38]

The experiments Donald would conduct in his research with unlimited funding over the next 10 years, and with whom he would choose to work. [1:40:31]

What is Donald reading these days? [1:42:43]

Donald names some of his long-time collaborators who pair mathematics with spiritual practice, and describes how he reconciles the two in his own work. [1:47:34]

How much pushback has Donald suffered for bringing spirituality into his scientific endeavors? Has any of it been constructive? [2:00:51]

How does fitness payoff function work in evolutionary theory, and how does this support the probability of zero that humans evolved to see reality in full? [2:03:27]

Parting thoughts. [2:05:46]

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