Donald Hoffman
Appearances
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
specific qualia that, you know, the universe is made of. And in some sense, they're universal. Obviously, you know, the human mind doesn't experience them all. But could we actually just, you know, make a list of all the experiences that have ever happened and will ever happen in the history of the universe? And love seems to me to be one of those things.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
qualities that can't be broken down further. I mean, it can kind of blow up into a complex. You can have many thoughts about it and ideas and beliefs and it can get very complicated, but I think at its core and, you know, I'm not an expert and it'd be a good question for Joseph actually, but where compassion and love
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
where those intersect, if they are, when they're in the purest form, are we actually talking about the same thing? But that type of pure emotion, if consciousness is fundamental, I would expect that to be kind of one of the ones that isn't broken down.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So people use the word consciousness in a variety of ways, but often people think of more complex thought, self-awareness, things that are more specific to human beings. But what I mean when I use the word and what I'm interested in and what I think is so mysterious and what's so difficult for scientists to study is, is something much more fundamental.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So consciousness in the most basic sense, which I usually like to just call felt experience. I think that's the best way of getting at what it is that I'm talking about. So if a B has some minimal level of consciousness. If a worm has some minimal level of consciousness and neuroscientists do not have a consensus on these things yet.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
We think it's likely that they have some conscious experience because they have brains and central nervous systems. But if they do, it's a very minimal experience. You know, something like a worm or a slug might just feel pressure against their skin. Maybe some internal kind of desire, like we have a feeling of hunger or something like that when they need to go towards food.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Maybe some minimal element of fear or even just an impulse to move away from something dangerous or something that wouldn't be good. Good for their system. And so when I use the word consciousness in this context and talking about the mystery of consciousness, I'm talking about consciousness in its most basic form, simply the fact of felt experience.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
The fact that I'm not just processing light waves that are bouncing off all the objects in this room. I'm seeing yellow, I'm seeing green, I'm seeing shapes, I'm having an experience from the inside in a way that we imagine computers don't. You know, computers and cameras can process light waves.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And we don't imagine that they see green or that there's any kind of experience of color or anything like that, even though they're processing similar things.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
inputs from the environment, the question is, and the really mysterious thing is, why does some processing, why do some organisms in nature have an experience of being the organism, have the experience of being that collection of atoms that's doing that processing? So sentience is also a great term, although it's not used that often in our culture and most people equate it with life.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So I don't use it that much. But the definition of sentience is really actually what I'm getting at here. Susceptibility to sensation, consciousness in its most basic form. So I use experience, I use awareness, felt experience and sentience interchangeably. But that is what I mean by consciousness.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Yes. So that phrasing comes from Thomas Nagel, the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a famous article, at least within the world of philosophy called, what is it like to be a bat?
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And he basically, you know, discusses what I was just explaining, but in a more philosophical and detailed sense, in terms of what different types of organisms might experience in the world, having vastly different sensory modalities, inputs, brains, that type of thing. And there's a great German word, umwelt, to describe, and that kind of covers everything
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
all of the types of conscious experiences a given organism has. So we have a human umwelt and bats would experience a different umwelt because they're experiencing sonar and navigating the world through a different sense than vision. Yeah.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Yeah. And that phrase comes from David Chalmers, the philosopher. Although the hard problem, you know, as a problem has been expressed many, many times throughout history, he kind of coined this great term and now we have this shorthand.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So the quote unquote easy problems of the brain and neuroscience and consciousness are what we're really at the beginning stages of now in neuroscience, which is understanding and learning which brain states correlate with which types of conscious experiences. The hard problem is why there would be any felt experience of any processing, brain processing or otherwise at all.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Oh, that's an interesting question. I'll say a few things.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And this is very intuitive for some people. For other people, it's not. Seeing how mysterious this actually is. But when you start to compare things that human beings do,
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
to things that other systems do, whether they're artificial intelligence systems or plant systems or insect systems, it's easy for us to see how other systems, or we intuit that other systems may not have a felt experience associated with processing. And it seems natural that human beings and maybe mammals do. But when you look more closely at
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
what that entails and what differences there are or that there really are a lack of to point to why some systems or some processing would not entail an experience from the inside and others would. It's actually very hard. to come up with a reason for it. It's also in terms of the sciences, science studies everything from the outside. And this isn't true beyond science.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
This is true in our daily lives, just our understanding of the world, of each other. We are only able to study, observe, try to understand, experience other things in the world from the outside, from their behavior, from their physical characteristics.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And so, you know, luckily human beings can communicate so well that we can get a pretty good sense of what we're each experiencing because we have this high level of communication and we're similar enough that we can talk about how we're feeling. But I can never have direct contact with your experience. I can't know your experience from the inside.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And so this is a real challenge for the sciences and for just us as curious creatures, how to better understand something that you can only know firsthand in terms of the experience itself. The experience itself exists for itself and can't be really received or penetrated from any other place.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Yes. So there are two questions that I raise in my book, and this is one of them. And I pose it that way because I think it gets at our deepest intuitions about what consciousness is. And it shows us how counterintuitive a lot of the answers to these two questions are. And the first one is essentially how you phrased it.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
can we find conclusive evidence from the outside of any system that consciousness is present in that system? And while we feel that the answer is yes, and I think we're correct in our assumptions about other human beings and mammals, the truth is it's actually...
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
impossible at this point in neuroscience and in our path as human beings to actually be able to conclusively say because the only evidence we can get is through communication. As I said, I can't jump into another experience and have that experience myself. And this is actually very interesting.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
I've been thinking a lot lately as I've been working on my documentary series about how important communication is for our ability really to talk about any experience at all. And we can't communicate if we don't share the same experiences. And so there's this limit. If I were talking to someone who were born blind and I was trying to explain something about my experience of seeing,
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
it's extremely limiting. I mean, I could give some analogies, but there would be no way for me to explain to someone who doesn't have vision what my world of sights is like. The more different an organism is from us, the less ability we have to communicate. And so it's easier for us to kind of assume we have evidence from organisms that are similar to us. It gets much more difficult
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
when there's an inability to communicate. And this is true with human beings as well. So in the case of someone who's experiencing locked in syndrome, which can happen from damage to the brain, either by stroke or an injury, that leaves the patient completely paralyzed, but their consciousness is still fully intact.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And so that's a situation that puts us closer to where we are in terms of looking at other organisms, other life forms, and not being able to know whether there's consciousness presence. If someone in a locked-in state looks like they're completely unconscious, they're totally paralyzed, they can't move.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Yet we now know based on some interesting stories we can talk about if you want, that many of these patients are actually having a full conscious experience. They can see everything in the room. They can hear everything in the room. They have thoughts. They're having as full a conscious experience as you and I are having right now with no ability to communicate.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Yeah, so the second question is related and very similar, but it kind of gets at this intuition from a different angle. The second question is, is consciousness doing something? It's about the causality of consciousness. Is it driving our behavior in the way that we feel it is? Is it informing our behavior in the way that we feel it is? Our intuitive answer to this is a resounding yes.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Also to the first question, both of our, we feel very strongly that the answer is yes to both of these questions I pose. And what's interesting is to start to shake up your intuitions and realize that we don't have great evidence for answering yes to either. And the answer may be yes to one or both, but it's surprising to dig a little deeper and realize we actually just don't know.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So we feel very strongly that you know, my experience of anger, my experience of fear, even my experience of thinking through my day and my planning, that I couldn't really do any of those things without the internal felt experience. I couldn't do those things without consciousness.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
If I said, you know, I woke up this morning and spent an hour prepping for this interview, but I was unconscious the whole time. It doesn't really make sense to us. So we have this intuition that, Consciousness is causal that it's doing something, but there are ways to kind of break through that intuition and get you to question whether that's the case.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Oh, that's an interesting question.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of different ways I could answer that, but I've never been asked that specific question. It's a great question. I will, I'll say a few things.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
One is that I think when we are able to drop these illusions of self and separation, for some reason, it seems to lend itself, well, not for some reason, for an understandable reason, it lends itself to feelings of compassion and love, I would put in that same category. And I think that is kind of this recognition of
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
being a part of something bigger than yourself, but that is also you, that it is all one thing. And so I think the natural inclination to love your family, love your children, I think that starts extending further and further. I think that's just a natural outcome of being in that state of mind.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
But I also do wonder, and this is one thing that I asked a few of my guests for my documentary series about, if consciousness is fundamental, is there kind of a set list and maybe it's an infinite list of qualia of specific felt experiences? Because I do think, and this is an insight in meditation that many people have had before me, but that I've also experienced.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
I actually talked to Joseph Goldstein in my series about this.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Yes. Yeah. He's very, very clear. In my conversation with Joseph and in my meditation experiences, having a sense that there are certain qualia, there are certain experiences that can't be broken down any further. And actually seeing a color is a good example of that. Yeah.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Often people have the experience also in meditation, this is another thing I've spoken to Joseph about, that when you get very concentrated and you're able to really be in each present moment, there's a realization that we're not actually seeing and feeling and hearing all in the same moment, that there's this kind of weaving that happens through memory and through the brain that gives the illusion that all of those things happen at the same time, but when you're really
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
concentrated and you're really going moment to moment, you see that all these things kind of fluctuate. You hear the sound of the bird, you see your notebook, and you're never really in one moment hearing the sound of the bird and seeing your notebook at the same time. There's this fluctuating. And so this question keeps coming up for me. Are there