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much I think at the moment in trying to explain Consciousness scientifically we're a bit like people trying to recreate a beautiful colorful oil painting like the Mona Lisa using uh pencil and paper we just don't have the right resources um so Neuroscience deals in action potentials right Action potentials are what our senses our nose ears eyes produce when they do their thing and convert light or

sound into signals that are ready to be processed and turned into Sensations in different parts of the brain um by the way sensation or feeling something that's really all I mean by Consciousness right you've got it uh the chair you're sitting on doesn't have it presumably a rock doesn't have it many animals have got it probably leeches don't have it that's all I really mean by

Consciousness but also so so folks think about the difference between uh Smelling Coffee tasting uh something else tasting lemon seeing a sunset smelling a rose there's just no way that different frequencies of of electrochemical activity in the brain which is really all that goes on could explain those differences it's as if I had a a factory with the same Machinery in it and by plonking it

down in different places it's suddenly just by virtue of that produced radically inexplicably different things like marshmallows over here tanks over there the the the the sensory the the neural apparatus of your different sensory areas in your brain is made of much the same Machinery it's just no way that uh the fact that they're in different places makes the difference between tasting Peach seeing a sunset

smelling a rose what's the answer we could get rid of Consciousness altogether which is what I think a neuroscience-based approach ultimately does or it it downgrades it so much that it's pretty much like getting rid of it like or doing Pepsi and being given Coke but like actually worse than that like the Neuroscience based account of Consciousness is just not the real thing or we could

do what Donald recommends and make Consciousness into everything that exists but then I just don't know how we know that we aren't alone in the universe how we know there's anyone else to talk to we might just be an empty mind in a big empty Universe mind you is something else right I think philosophy can kind of supplement science to give us that extra something that

Mata needs to produce a conscious mind out of a brain to give us a more colorful if you like enriched picture of the matter to explain how you get Consciousness in a material world what's the extra something else well uh different options maybe maybe matter itself has a conscious aspect or maybe it has something that is closely related to but less than Consciousness but when you

put it together in the right way it gives us Consciousness I think something like that anyway is going to be the way to understand Consciousness in a material universe thanks very much Sam that's great I'll now pose the same question to Donald Hoffman um for three minutes Donald is it a fundamental mistake to think that the world and Consciousness are purely material thank you so by

material I think of objects in space and time and physicists such as David Gross and Nima arkani Hamid are now telling us that space-time is doomed by that they mean space-time is not fundamental and they're not just throwing up their hands and giving up the physicists have now found structures Beyond space-time like the positive grossmanian the amplitudehedron and there so this this is all new that's

only been in the last 10 years that they've for example had the amplitohedron but the idea that space and time and objects like um bosons leptons and quarks particles and so forth are fundamental is now no longer the received opinion um there's something deeper like the amplitahedron and beyond that something called decorative permutations and so so the idea of reductionism is also doomed according to physicists

like name or Connie Ahmed the idea that as we go to smaller and smaller scales in space and time we find more and more fundamental laws and more and more fundamental entities that's also dead so so I'm not a pan psychist in the sense that I don't want to try to put Consciousness in the elementary particles because the the physicists themselves tell us that space-time and

the so-called Elementary particles are doomed we have to go entirely outside of space-time and and trying to put Consciousness inside of particles or behind particles we have we have to have a much deeper framework now evolution by natural selection also agrees this is work that I've done with some of my colleagues it also agrees that um our perceptions of space and time are not an insight

into the nature of reality they're they're merely an uh an interface an artifact of our of our perceptual sensory systems there's a technical question what is the probability that Evolution would shape sensory systems to see any aspect of the structure of reality as it is and it turns out the probability is precisely zero that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see any aspect of

the structure of objective reality so Evolution and the physicists agree space-time is doomed and and reductionism is doomed and so we have to look for Theory Of Consciousness outside of it and and I would agree with with Sam that solipsism is not the answer either we we needed a theory of Consciousness that's not so upsistic thank you Donald that's great Hannah can I turn to you

then in terms of what Donald's saying and you've written a book on Consciousness so firstly this question of how you're defining Consciousness and I was also really interested in Donald saying he's worked on these neural correlates and his question is um do they really give rise to Consciousness and whether you could also look at that too that that question of the the particular phraseology as well

so if we think of the idea of Consciousness as our ability to form an individual unique sense of reality that's based on our experiences but also the genes that have been given to us from our mum and dad which also then includes Donald's discussion on Evolution um and also his idea on the the importance of the microtubules as well so basically within each of our brains

we have this wonderful neural circuitry that connects up 86 billion nerve cells into this circuit board of around 100 trillion connections as we learn things from our environment as we take in information from the outside world and we solidify them within our circuit board what happens is that there's a new connection that forms from one nerve cell to another nerve cell so that's something as we

learn in our environment this is what we see in the brain as we're learning things as we um consider consolidate that learn thing into a memory that becomes a stable connect connection within the mind and so it can become a fast route of information transfer across that very complex intricate circuit board and each of us have a very individual cartography a very individual circuit board within

our mind based on our experiences and also the genes that we're given from our mum and dad and that's what creates our very individual sense of reality our very individual perception of the world so there's some lovely research that's come out of Christopher and uterus Labs at University College London where they've basically taken different individuals and asked them about their sense of reality about the world

and because we all take shortcuts in information processing so each each of us use about 20 of our daily energy quota in order to send those electric signals whizzing across our very individual circuit board within our mind to create our sense of reality but we each take little shortcuts because our brain is so busy creating this up-to-date sense of reality that it has to make use

our pre previous experiences in order to make assumptions and so what they found in the lab is that when you bring together different people um and ask them about their sense of reality and ask them to discuss freely discuss their sense of reality then they're much more likely to get towards a more accurate representation of reality because they're balancing out any bias um any kind of

errors that are coming up in that individual sense of perception of the world so really what's important is our Collective Consciousness not the individual Consciousness because we're each individually deeply flawed because of the energy metabolism within our brain thank you that's really interesting in this sense as well of the individuals Within These wider terms you know that there are many many consciousnesses I think we'll talk

about that later as well because I know Donald has a theory that also um relates to that to continue watching this video click the link in the top left or in the description below or visit iai.tv for more debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas