[Music] what is the mind what is the universe are they one and the same is one an illusion created by the other are these questions meaningless to begin with why even ask them in recent videos we have discussed the strange results of quantum mechanics and its implications mind is fundamental realism has been falsified and matter doesn't exist independent of measurement the scientific evidence has piled up and led us to this conclusion however through a simple deduction we can see that these conclusions have been right in front of us the whole time so without further delay
let us begin premise one the Mind exists no one with a mind can doubt this whether you think the mind is an emerging property of the brain or a fundamental substance you cannot doubt that your mind exists what I mean by Consciousness Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that that can't be an illusion it it's Consciousness is the fact of experience the fact that that that something is happening you know the fact the lights are on in some basic sense even if we don't understand anything premise two the properties of the Mind are
not that which matter can have this can be seen with the difference between mental properties and physical properties consider two things feeling pain p and an electrical signal to the brain are they the same thing of course not because an electrical signal to the brain can happen without the feeling of pain what we experience is a correlation between an electrical signal and the mental feeling of pain but one can see the coherence of a possible world where one experiences pain without the need for an electrical signal The Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel says if a mental
event is really a physical event in this sense and nothing else then the physical event by itself once once its physical properties are understood should likewise be sufficient for the taste of sugar the feeling of pain or whatever it is supposed to be identical with but it doesn't seem to be it seems conceivable for any physical event there should be a physical event without any experience at all experience of taste seems to be something extra contingently related to the brain States something produced rather than constituted by the brain state so it cannot be identical to
the brain state in the way that water is identical to H2 o the point is that things like qualia are not physical substances what we experience is mental substances like qualia and then we assume they come from physical substances in and of themselves but a mental substance like the taste of sugar does not exist with the physical substance they are nothing more than the mental experience and all we really know and then we just assume they correlate to physical properties therefore upon examination mental properties and physical properties are conceptually detected Ed no amount of introspection
can ever reduce to the chemistry of the brain there's nothing about introspection that leads you to sense that your subjectivity is at all dependent or even related to voltage changes and chemical interactions going on inside your head okay you can you can feel you can drop acid you can meditate for a year you can do whatever you want to perturb your nervous system you can you can feel yourself to be one with the universe and at no point in that transformation do you get a glimpse that there's 100 trillion neurons in your head uh or
synapses in your head that that are doing anything but since we know that the mental experience is not a necessary property of a physical substance then they cannot be the same thing and the mental substance is something separate in all we truly experience thus our first conclusion is mind is not reducible to matter premise three substance dualism is false according to substance dualism there are two fundamental kinds of substances matter and mind however this view quickly leads to problems regarding the interaction of matter and mind the internal contradictions of interactionism demonstrate that two fundamental types
of substances cannot interact if they did they would interact via shared property however if they share a property then they are not separate substances at all either mind shares a physical property with matter or matter shares a mental property with mind as such substance dualism becomes incoherent on close inspection and must be rejected though obvious to many these three premises lead us to a conclusion that many find unacceptable however with a simple deduction the conclusion is inescapable if the Mind exists and cannot be reduced to matter and if substance dualism is false then no other
substance exists thus we conclude all is mind the universe is a mental construct without surprise to idealists this is what the experimental results of quantum mechanics tells us matter is not fundamental in and of itself but cannot exist prior to measurement which was pointed out in our last two videos and the properties of matter have no independent existence Beyond how one chooses to measure them that there is no objective reality beyond what we observe what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure thus the argument is not a mere a
priori logical possibility or just an interesting thought but in fact predicts the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics the evidence suggests the universe is fundamentally Al it processes and stores information at the microscopic level on everything we see around us and if the universe is processing information then it must be thinking and it must be alive this would come to no surprise to many of the pioneers of quantum theory Max plank famously said there is no matter as such all matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force we must assume behind this Force the
existence of a conscious and intelligent mind this mind is the Matrix of all matter sir Rudolph Pierce said the moment at which you can throw away one possibility and keep only the other is when you finally become conscious of the fact that the experiment has given one result you see the quantum mechanical description is in terms of knowledge and knowledge requires somebody who knows now is there an escape from this what about property dualism could one just use premise one and premise 2 to arrive at property dualism that the mental world is just a property
of physical substances and therefore doesn't reduce to its own substance but it's just a separate property emerging from matter however this is not parsimonious or verifiable since we only interact through qualia on a mental level if there is mental and physical properties of one substance it is not parsimonious to posit separate properties that we do not interact with just to save an independent physical reality however more importantly is that the Mind cannot reduce to just a property this can be shown in a simple deduction premise one if solipsism is conceivable then a possible world could
exist such that only the Mind exists copsis is of course the view that only your mind exists and everything else is an illusion of it premise 2 copsis is conceivable therefore a possible World exists with only a mind in it premise three possible worlds canot only consist of properties or processes but must also include entities premise 4 there is no difference between the Mind existing in a copsis world and the actual world this stems from liin its law IND discernability of identicals if there are any two things and if are identical to each other then
for what is true of one will be true of the other therefore the conclusion is thus the Mind cannot be a property or a process and therefore physical property dualism doesn't escape the argument now some would be scared by this argument because they would assume it leads to solipsism but as we said in our last video Richard con Henry and Steven palmquest point out a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative the solipsism one doesn't need to jump to the extreme idealist view that only your mind exists but simply hold to the
The View that the mental World creates the construct of the physical world many philosophers have also noted that we are not in control of the way the universe behaves and therefore it is not reasonable to assume that it is just a creation of only your mind but of all is mind then we have to deduce that it is dependent on a much larger mind which is why theism is the only rational alternative to solipsism although this position may be rejected by many as unacceptable and hold of the notion of a mind independent reality the conclusion
still follows in fact we cannot even conceive of a mind independent reality without a mind as Max plank said I regard Consciousness as fundamental I regard matter as derivative from Consciousness we cannot get behind Consciousness everything that we talk about everything that we regard as existing postulates Consciousness so as we said this argument is not just a clever thought but in fact predicts the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics but what about those who still reject these philosophical implications well as Ian Squire said it is probably fair to say that most members of the physics Community
would reject these ideas however the reasons would be based more on Prejudice than on sound argument and the proportion of those who rejected would be much smaller if we considered only those who had actually thought carefully about the problems of quantum [Music] theory
