Consciousness Is Not Material.

First time in this channel and by looking at you and I could guess somewhat ur perspective on life and such

Is this on purpose? Nice psyops

Luke keeps saying that consciousness is something different. Not any real argument though. Because there isn't any. Believing in spirits and free will is an evolution mechanism.

I have a supplemental argument against the idea that consciousness “arises” through materialism and complexity.

It’s really hard to explain unless someone is arguing against me so I have to put it in a dialogue which people will inevitably call a strawman but I’ve yet to hear anyone get around this.


Me: The big bang cosmology is nonsensical because it really does seem to say that first there was nothing then it blew up. What created this first thing?

Materialist/physicalist: What created God?

Me: We who believe in God believe in eternity, God is uncreated and eternal. Matter may also be eternal(orthodox heresy) or created, but God and therefore the mind and consciousness and all things are eternal through Him.

Materialist: Okay so then we can say Matter is eternal if you can say God is.

Me: If that is the case then it cannot be the case that intelligence and consciousness arises from Matter over a course of billions of years like you believe in your evolutionary cosmology.

Because if consciousness and intelligence arises from matter which is eternal then there can be no arbitrary demarcation of time where x doesn’t exist to x exists over time. It is eternal therefore time is a construct. To say there was once a time in eternity when there was only matter and then suddenly at some time in eternity there was now intelligence is a nonsensical statement.


It can only be the case that either only consciousness/will/intelligence is eternal (and matter is a matrix construct of consciousness) or both consciousness/will/intelligence and matter are eternal. But it cannot be the case that matter is eternal and then over time suddenly made consciousness. Because eternity implies the beginning present and end all at once without distinction.


In the face of eternity 5 billion years can be really long or basically nothing at all. So it’s completely arbitrary to say “oh life just took a long time to form”. A long time relative to eternity is arbitrary and every possible arrangement of matter is already accounted for.

pure unadulterated christcuck cope. Demonstrate where this magical "non-physical force" arises. Consciousness is just an activity of biological physical organisms. It's not even a noun

Stop being mean to the computer

I think the coherent way to see it is: our mind interacts in a way based on a demand applied to it. The brain acts based upon the action placed onto it, but the question is: where does this demand come from?

Luke, drop the Graham Hancock video. Thanks.

i like all the reddit atheist anime pfp people straight up arguing whether or not they have consciousness lol

Man, what happened to you, did you have some sort of spiritual experience?

modern computer science debunks all of these arguments.

1) there are multiple types of computers, Classical Computers aka Turing Machines and Quantum computers(there is more than just these two). there is a mathematical proof that Searle's Chinese room though experiment only applies to Classical computers. There is also a proof that quantum computers can solve more problems than classical computers including some semantic problems. Both types of computers are made of matter but there is a computational difference between macro newtonain processes and quantum processes.(see bells theorem)
2) the "is ought" distinction already exists in artificial intelligence under a different name. Its called the orthogonality principle. In an AI your intelligence algorithm is orthogonal to your goal. This doesn't stop you from having a physical circuit that represents your goal. in fact you would need one for any AI to operate at all.
3)your knowledge of mathematics is..... problematic. there are whole fields of non numerical mathematics. see set theory or type theory for instance(these are just a small number of non numerical math systems). set theory for example works with sets of objects. Those objects could be numbers or could be things other than numbers. Its important to note that in set theory the sets themselves are the important mathematical objects we are working with and not what they contain. so if you have a set containing a number the number is not what is important in that field of mathematics.
4) computers are mathematical objects that are physical... They literally are the mathematical function.... Turing Machines are a sets in set theory.
5) numbers are a lot more powerful than one would realize. I would look up uncomputable numbers for instance. The idea of a number being uncomputable destroys the possibility of mathematics being deterministic. I would also look up the ordinal numbers and aleph numbers just for fun.

There was a religious cult in ancient Greece that proposed consciousness was purely a product of physical 'atoms' and the idea was by believing this it would remove your fear of death because when you died you'd no longer exist so there would be nothing to worry about. I suppose it was because their gods weren't very nice or Hades wasn't a fun place to be.

What if consciousness "generates" the physical realm into existence?

just shave it bro. dear lord.

In islam we generally associate consciousness with the soul, and allah speaks about it in the quran directly when he says : "And they ask you, [O Muhammad], about the soul. Say, "The soul is of the affair of my Lord. And mankind have not been given of knowledge except a little." 17:85

If you accept the basic premise of the idea commonly labelled 'evolution', then it follows that there may be very good reasons why a creature that has evolved to conceive of itself as separate from it's environment and to possess a consistent sense of individual identity, might find itself in a the ascendency (for now).

Such a self absorbed type of creature might also end up with a lot of internal cognitive resonance in response to it's sensory world. And what might such incredible resonating feel like to the resonator itself? well it feels real, and it feels almost substantial. But if it is just that, a feeling of substantiality, that serves the purpose of strongly anchoring you to a sense of you in your environment, and in combination with a historical sense of you, leads to optimal adaption to the environment, wouldn't that be magic enough?

Now the short version - You are the story your brain is telling itself, and it is a riveting story, because if it was not riveting you wouldn't be here.

Under idealism, the stuff we call material is also inside the mind , just a mental process inside conscioussness.

there's a jump in logic here that's not warranted
all the experiment tells you is that some things may appear conscious while they aren't
it doesn't actually tell you anything about real consciousness

Hey Luke,
My issue with your argument is that you are merely asserting that consciousness has to be distinct from the material world, while at the same time acknowledging that we don't really know what it is — and that it's probably a different substance that is out of reach for us. That seems to imply there's no point in trying to understand it using our usual scientific tools and methods.

At the same time, it seems like you are giving value to consciousness and to beings imbued with it. It sounds that way because, in one of your previous videos, you seemed to say that AI doesn't matter because it is merely computing and does not have consciousness.

If you happen to read this comment, I think it would be interesting to ponder a question like this:
Let's say we discovered life on another planet that behaved and talked a bit like us. How would you determine whether they have consciousness or not? That would have a real impact on how we evaluate their worth.

As far as I understand your argument, I see basically no way of doing so.

To summarize my point:
If we can't know what consciousness is or detect it with scientific tools, how can we confidently say AI doesn't have it — or that aliens (or animals) do? Isn't it arbitrary (and potentially dangerous) to deny value to beings simply because they're not human — or biological and earthly, or whichever criteria you think we should apply to them?
By the way, it would be interesting to know what that criterion would be for you, because you haven’t really touched on it.

Luke I have been watching you since 2016. And i really really appreciate you for putting this discourse of discussion.

I believe we can create artificial intelligence, but it will be likely based on non-computational methods. Analog computers or even biocomputers. There is a chance that consciousness is coming from quantum effects or even something beyond quantum. In any case, humanity will come with some solution to the artificial labor force. At the very least can grow brains in the jars from living cells. It is possible that in the future we will be able to replicate the biological process of how the brain grows from the living cell, but using some sort of "living machines" - a matter that can grow and reconfigure similarly to how our neurons do. But the current computational approach is only giving us some sort of approximation based on prediction algorithms.

The word "material" and "physical" is doing a lot of work here. I think you should define it in detail. In my understanding, physical is everything we can understand now or in future and i "believe" that we can understand everything in theory so everything is physical by definition.

War of words, material, non material

but matter at its quantum state is not material either...

My orthodox rabbi 😍

AI making research 10x easier

There's nothing other than matter, and no one could prove otherwise. Your feelings about non-matter things, is just an outcome of complex material interactions.

I think AI can emulate consciousness very good(depends how good we teach it) as long as interact with humans or I could say AI could be conscious but their consciousness lacks conscious at some point(if not now).
Obviously a well trained AI is more conscious than a dog although the dog is alive and AI is not but that's emulation which is different than being intelligent, and even that emulation is customized by humans not by AI itself...I mean if they r conscious, then where were they a century ago? they did not exist let alone conscious, their so called "consciousness" always will depend on humans.

dumb take

Matter is consciousness taking form

i understand the impulse to privilege the read side of a homeostatic feedback loop.

what I dont understand is your swag.

Enjoy my upcummies, Luke.

Everything is material, but not everything is understood.

This is basically just asserting that consciousness is immaterial, and asserting on top that material can’t substantiate consciousness, but consciousness can influence material.

It’s not wrong to think of consciousness as an abstract thing. It’s a pattern, and a process. When web browsers process HTML and run javascript, it is the same vague conceptual process, but with various implementation differences, and as an abstract thing it transcends hardware. But ultimately, it doesn’t exist unless you actually put it on hardware. Or in our case, wetware. Everything is a slave to material. If an abstract thing or process is beheld in someone’s mind, there is still a material mind grounding it. If there is no material grounding, there is no way to confirm it actually exists. There is no good argument for a detached and isolated consciousness existing in some sense without material to stand on and interact with.

At which point, why bother differentiating it from material. Magnetic compasses used to be ghosts.

Another analogous argument: how can matter produce a colour or a sound?

There is mind and there is matter, neither is permanent. Matter arises and passes away, mind arises as a result of matter arising, then passes away as a result of matter passing away in an endless cycle.

I believe we can create artificial intelligence, but it will be likely based on non-computational methods. Analog computers or even biocomputers. There is a chance that consciousness is coming from quantum effects or even something beyond quantum. In any case, humanity will come with some solution to the artificial labor force. At the very least can grow brains in the jars from living cells. It is possible that in the future we will be able to replicate the biological process of how the brain grows from the living cell, but using some sort of "living machines" - a matter that can grow and reconfigure similarly to how our neurons do. But the current computational approach is only giving us some sort of approximation based on prediction algorithms.

If it isnt material, why do substances affect consciousness?

But material is nothing but consciousness

Now I got the feel of what you've been trying to say

Dude, you seriously need to shave the back of your head. That shit is super freaky sticking out around your ears from portrait view.

Well, consciousness is definitely not binary!

If you say that consciousness is affected by the material world, then you acknowledge that consciousness and the physical share some kind of similarity.
If you say that consciousness is affected by the material world, then you also say that consciousness and the physical world are dual.
So it appears Luke as a dual view, consciousness and the material world can interact, but the 2 are independent of the other in substance.

Really fascinating. I wonder, are you familiar with Julian Jaynes bicameral mind hypothesis? It's the most interesting take on consciousness I have ever seen. Reading his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind".

If someone open their eyes in the morning, see what's around them, and then say "my consciousness is an illusion", they're either mentally blinding themselves, or they're really an NPC.

Thanks for posting this. Lots of synchronicity happening for me around so many of the terms you'd mentioned here. Appreciate this particular video as I'm currently reading Liber Indigo by Justin C. Kirkwood and it's quite complementary.

read 'sizing up consciousness' by Guilio Tononi

You're on the right track.