Marvin Minsky - Is Consciousness Entirely Physical?

Audio soooo low

According to his view that belief in God and our being created in His Image demoralizes us so that we never investigate anything is contradicted by Newton, Kepler, Boyle, Pascal, Faraday, Maxwell and other Christians who were pioneers in science and mathematics. What is demeaning is to say that we are simply collections of protoplasm with no intrinsic dignity.

this conversation completely miss the point, he keep talking about measuring when the qualitative aspect of consciousness is not measurable because is not quantitative

An excellent plumber, merely by virtue of that specific excellence, is no more the ultimate authority on M&M polishing, than Minsky is on Consciousness.

There are just so many fallacious comments here. One example. Consciousness being mysterious or spiritual (i.e. non material) doesn’t mean there is God involved. No one evokes God as to Time and space, which are both non material. Nor thoughts and feelings. It is also nutty to say that if consciousness was non-material, then somehow his precious credit for proving theorems will be take away. That is an unnecessary insecurity. A material universe can arise and coexist with a non-material component quite well. They do.

Consciousness mightn’t be spiritual, but Marv sure didn’t make many cogent articles to prove his point.

What Martin doesn’t comprehend - is it goes without saying that the brain is liken to an electrical conjunction box and without that apparatus, “CONSCIOUSNESS “ IS UNABLE TO PROCESS THRU THE SINGLE, EXTERNAL MANIFESTATION/ENITY - (UNDERSTAND THIS, WORDS ARE NOT THINGS BUT ARE DESCRIPTIONS OF THINGS AND SUBJECT TO CURRENT CONNOTATION) -

What Martin continues to point out is that the machine/computer is able to recognize blue -

but i doubt that the MACHINE WILL BE ABLE TO COMPREHEND THE BEAUTY OF (A PARTICULAR), BLUE. :-)

CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE UNIFIED FIELD - SCIENCE IS UNABLE TO COMPREHEND THIS - IF SCIENCE CAN’T SMELL IT. FONDLE IT OR LICK IT. SCIENCE IS UNABLE TO COMPREHEND IT

SCIENCE IS HARD WIRED IN THIS WAY, AND FOR GOOD REASON, FAR BE IT FROM ME TO JEOPARDIZE THE STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY OF THE BRIDGE -:)

...posted two days after Marvin's death.

There is nothing beyond the physical world, there is no physical world itself. People just pretend and forget that it's a concept.

"when you know how the magic trick works, then the sense of wonder goes away..." Uh yeah, but you still need to SHOW US (including the philosophers you have no respect for) how it works if you claim to know 🙄 FFS... Towards the end you find out the real reason he's so resistant to other ideas about consciousness.. "the idea of the soul is very demeaning.. I spent a lot of time doing math and science.." sounds like someone thinks they're a very very important scientist who can't explain consciousness.

If we build a computer with all the sensors we have including internal processes, the the computer will be aware of the same things as us? No! Without the soul, there is no personal purpose. Every computer would have the same information and do the same thing with it. Only the reflection of free will can free up potentials! There would be no reason for research. Would the super computer research a way to build legs and inspire you to build them? Yes, if it had a soul.

Consciousness see more to world in the physical world.
a machine can see a shirt and that is blue. What they means , there is a sensation of blueness. They mystery is why is this process . There is nothing of seeing blue and red. There are cells in the brain that are made to process blue or red. These shapes see blue or different patterns. As real.
it men’s there model is its so simple real or imaginary
if, i take out part of the brain its not there.
a third person analyses. All that differentiated it. This quali this sensation can’t be communicated to anyone else. A first person experience that means consciousness is a first person experience.e. The idea, that i have access to my thoughts ,we all know a person wh has a friend knows marry and can predicte. A person has a part of brain.. i do not have access of to all my self. My brain doesn’t know it all or experience 20 or 30 meanings keeps changing to one thing as consciousness
the process is non physical
we analyses to go beyond physical world. Physical world is all we know. If there is anyone else, that is there opinion. Then,you wast your time. It’s not physical why worry about it..
consciousness cannot be explained there is always going to be something left over. First person experience is when you notice there are other people who can do the same as i. The baby realize the concept of self, my body and my mind. Identity of self. This is al , i can do and all i have. This is me.

A very intelligent man with very interesting ideas, but his arrogance makes me want to dismiss him.

RIP

U can see he's a conductor and a probably a good one

The physical world is all we know? Huh?

Fantastic interview. Good spanking of the Searles, Chalmers and Nagels! Well done!

Consciousness is just a computer program.

The ending is very sad. He's so smart and capable, but has no wisdom and is lost.

You are God projecting your reality for all eternity. You are I am and there is nothing else but consciousness.

At the end of the day, this gentleman is in effect saying that I'm a Chess player and have made some good moves, so it's impossible that there is Beauty - because Beauty isn't Chess and there are no equations for it. Modern scientific exploration has fallen into a hole.

These atheists just won't quit, Darwinian evolution is dead, disproved. This person claims humans evolved to understand the color blue, and he does so with absolutely zero evidence. He is a liar, he knows he is a liar, I know he is a liar, atheism is his religion believed on blind faith.

This is why I hate philosophy.

Are all epstein associates p zombies? Many scientists are looking into it.

there's nothing wrong with saying "i don't know". what is consciousness? where does it come from? "i don't know". what people instead do is take the ambiguity of the concept and use it as a cloak inject their religious beliefs into it. "atheists don't have an explanation for consciousness, therefore, god." it's the god of the gaps. people didn't know what electricity was so they said it was thor banging on his anvil. they didn't know where waves came from so they said it was Jörmungandr was shifting his body.

Marvin should try talking with his hands

The basic argument of materialism is an axiom..no matter what they will discover about human consciousness there is no way to prove the origin of matter as a manifestation of stuff from an absolute nothingness..this is as absurd and ridiculous of a claim as the christians saying that god within all eternity choose to send his " son " on this particular planet a specific time at a specific place!

A universe that we can not measure does not exist until the means for measuring the soul, God ,whatever, come along and then that will become part of the natural world.

I swear he's conducting

So easy to get hung up on “is that all there is?” Materialism is better called “physicalism “ because it’s obvious that our experience is not a material. It is, however, the behaviour of materials. Let’s remember E=mc2. This material we are talking about has an energy equivalence. Maybe we’re not made of material, we’re made of energy. Not “consciousness “ but energy. Just like William Blake said.

Really poor arguments.

This dude is a stone bummer.

Professor Minsky, talk about a hand waving argument!

Just A fool MM

Moving the hands is called behavior. When the motor processes are so closely tied to the brain processes we can say it is behavior all of the way down.

I have immense respect for Marvin but this was embarrassing to watch because it's clear he doesn't understand the soul/non- material consciousness arguement.

Minsky clearly established that consciousness is entirely physical. But, we are not "stuck" with our initial self-concept. We feel and perceive that we are the same person, but we have many versions of the self throughout life.

OBRA MAESTRA

hes got his view and thats all he can have his view as any commentator will have the choice to repudiate my view of his if they so wish ,

Physician here, I'll give up watching scientists trying to explain consciousness - seriously. So far to me Freeman Dyson is the only one worth watching (not being disrespectful, only sincere)

I asked Bing Chat AI "What do most people think is unintelligent but really is intelligent?". It gave me 3 answers with one of them being the following: "Being expressive: Expressive people use their voice, gestures, facial expressions and words to communicate effectively. They can convey their emotions, thoughts and intentions clearly and persuasively, which demonstrates their intelligence and confidence."

Yawn.

I find myself reacting to this guy. Minsky: "When you know how the magic trick works then the sense of wonder goes away, although you might still remember how it puzzled you once." He's a lot like Quine, just dismissing our phenomenological world with the wave of his hand, and insisting all we need is to understand physical processes in order to understand the world. But how do we come to understand our use of the imagination, our ability to discuss things that are not physically present by pointing to things in the brain? No matter how many layers of neurons or brain "modules" that make up the brain, that's not going to help us to understand how we can know about infinity or our sense of ourselves in relation to others. I notice that this video has been around for seven years, but it hasn't had a lot of viewings, which means that Minsky's views are not particularly popular. I'm not surprised. I find them distasteful.

I don't think the argument sometimes people can more accurately predict how another person will react to something more than the person themself is a strong one against qualia/the first person perspective. Thats just people having poor self awareness and lacking introspection. We're often wrong about our own feelings and motivations but there is still a "self" being deluded about something. A therapist who can make accurate assumptions about a persons emotions still doesn't have access to what its like to be that person. I think thats a weak argument against qualia that misses the point

Fully agree. There nothing that suggests that there are other worlds that the one we live in, except... our imagination.
But is it a good idea to believe in imaginary worlds!?

Who is aware of this apparent material? How does material come to be conscious of itself? Perhaps consciousness is an illusion, but what is this 'thing' or phenomenon that is curious of it's environment?

He's burning in hell right now. It's so sad! It didn't have to be that way. People should check out CTMU, the work of Christopher Langan, a TRUE genius.

This guy does not seem to understand the idea of "qualia". He keeps resorting to straw man arguments about "immediacy" etc; the hard problem of consciousness is not based on it being "immediate". And we dont "know" that the material world exists; we think it does but we cant be sure because everything we see, hear or measure is filtered through consciousness. He seems extraordinarily narrow-minded and incurious.

He has no respect for views that disagree with his and so he never bothered understanding what they actually are saying.