Why is Consciousness Baffling? | Episode 401 | Closer To Truth

science will never "find" consciousness. it's like having a character in a movie searching for the screen on which he appears to be.

If you read this, thank you for tackling these questions and recording it free for the public.

There is no irony more intense than brain activity not understanding how it can manifest it’s own activity.

This man has one of the best jobs in the world. I would pay all the money I have to be able to talk to all these people and ask them questions. Thank you very much for your work, I really appreciate the information that you put on Youtube for free.

It's baffling because we are the thing we're looking for :) You are it! In the same way, you can't bite your own teeth. You are not the body and mind, they are localised as contents of consciousness. Consciousness is non-localised which is the real you. The problem Robert is having is that when he's critiquing Roger Walsh, he's doing it from a separate subject-object standpoint. You can't get there from here! Everything you think you know has to be dropped completely, including you the person before you can even begin to really understand the mind. We need to change our most basic assumptions and the very foundation from which we are looking. Maybe then, some progress can be made. But ultimately Charlie Tart is right, consciousness will always remain a mystery. But the best thing you can do is find out for yourself what you really are, with self-enquiry and meditation.

I'm not a scientist, though I started down that path in college. I spent time studying the brain and artificial intelligence. In planning out visions of what could possibly done in a computer, I came across the same questions being asked here. I realized that I could in time simulate just about anything that the brain does, emotions, memories, feelings. Yet they would just be simulations. One gear turning another in a complex array of gears that would appear to be conscious, yet... it would at it's core just be a mesh of causes and effects and there still wouldn't be anything "experiencing" the simulated emotions, memories and feelings. I think that emotions, feelings and memories are complex senses, just like sight, touch and sound. Thus they can be affected chemically or physically. But you still can't explain or affect the part of a person that experiences those things.

To quote Roger Penrose: "Whatever consciousness is, it is not computation."

I asked my science teacher what conciseness is. He told me to stop asking stupid questions..

To producers and crew, much appreciated, thank you.

The music to Closer to truth is like a Hitchcock thriller..love it.