Is the Person All Material? | Episode 404 | Closer To Truth

I've thought for a long time now that everything has some form of consciousness to a greater or lesser degree. Good to see someone who knows what they are talking about agree even if I still dont know if its true

We are spiritual beings having this human experience.

Love this show. ❤

The question is: can consciousness exist without a material basis. The next question arises: what is consciousness and what is material and what is the link between material, consciousness and reality. There are a lot of questions to be answered. If you remove my body will I still be I, if I have my body and you remove my thoughts am I still I. Where am I???

The issue is really about what makes us different from other things. We are obviously different from inanimate objects such as rocks and earth. For a start we are alive and they aren't and never have been. But then so are plants and though we shared certain attributes with plants we don't consider them like us. For example, plants respire, they grow, move with the sun, catch diseases, grow old and die and yet they do all of this without thoughts so it is thoughts that distinguish higher animals from other things. The origins of thoughts and feelings is the clue. How a physical process like chemical reactions can generate something as abstract as a thought is a mystery to modern science that many are trying to unravel. We know that a nerve impulse generated in the brain travels down muscle fibres to make them twitch. We know a simple chemical exchange occurs at the neuromuscular junction to facilitate this. What we don't know is what changes similar chemical process into abstract thoughts and images. We theorise that multiple neurones firing create these thoughts, but unlike the simple structure at the neuromuscular junction we don't know how this process actually works. Saying it takes billions of neurones to fire to create a thought is like saying it takes many more neurones to fire down to the hand for a pianist to play a concerto than it does for someone to hammer a nail. The latter is obvious but how recruiting more neurones at once leads to a thought is not. We need a mechanism to link the physical process to the final outcome which in the case of the muscle contraction is a process we can see , i.e. a muscle twitch. As thought is abstract we cannot see a thought directly but only see the effects of that thought, i.e. someone running away or speaking. So linking the only thing we can detect for example neurones firing to thought generation which is invisible to us, is a difficulty. Overcoming this will ultimately help us understand what it is that makes us human and also lead the way to speeding up the development of artificial intelligence. In short for humans to understand what a thought is, can be as conceptually challenging as explaining to someone who has never had sight, what sight actually is. The fact that we struggle to understand this and may never understand this is a sign that this may originate from outside ourselves and our material world. Consider this, if we never had sight. None of us. Would anyone ever be able to invent it?

The part about the center of narrative gravity and how it's analogous to the Earth's gravity really blew my mind.

Brilliant, as always - Bravo

Great summation at the end, Dr Kuhn !

That was awesome. At the end the 5 possibilities are not exclusive. It could be a mix of all of them and more. So good.

"narrative center of gravity" ... best remark i've heard from dennett.