Marvin if there's any concept that has haunted me throughout my life is is there anything more to reality than the physical world that we know and in the last couple of decades it's been fascinating because this concept of Consciousness has been used by not only theologians but atheistic philosophers who although they don't believe in God see in Consciousness some indication that there is more to the world than the physical world they come up with all sorts of theories but it but at heart there's something more than the physical world well the example of that that
I find most striking is when one of these I know the philosophers you're talking about and they'll say I can understand how a machine could do all the kinds of things a person can but now of course they're lying uh they're oversimplifying they haven't the slightest idea how people do most of the things do so uh we already have to take them with a grain of salt but they say but I can understand how a machine could look at some object and say that shirt is blue and uh what do they mean by Blue they
mean that there's an immediate sensation of bless which is not physical it's hard to explain what could a sensation be and they say the mystery is how come this is so immediate and intense and realistic and so forth if it's just a bunch of complicated processes well the answer is that every phrase of what I just said is wrong there's nothing immediate about seeing blue or red uh there are uh cells in the brain that are good for that have evolved in the retina that have evolved to be sensitive to red light and then there
are some eight levels of processing where you uh some part of the brain finds that there's some colored patches that they're connected as a colored region it has a certain shape and that shape is part of some other thing and sometimes if you see uh doesn't it look like this hand has fingers you can't see them it's almost as immediate to see the parts that you're imagining as the parts that are real so when uh those philosophers talk about how sensation and subject Ive experience is immediate that's very funny because what it means is their
model of how their mind works is so simple that it just divides into uh real and imaginary and so uh I don't have much respect for those philosophers because it's not immediate in fact if I take parts of the brain out you don't see that if I take other parts of the brain out you say you see it when it isn't there and there are lots of things that can go wrong with that process well what they talk about is the difference between a third person analysis I see blue because it's a certain wavelength and
it hits the retina this way and you do all the analysis all that differentiated from what they say the first person experience is that this qualia this Sensation that that can't be communicated to anyone else I don't know if the blue I see looks the same to the blue us to even though we both call it blue because that's this first person experience and the fact that they is a firstperson experience means that Consciousness is something special well the first answer is that what you see as blue is not the same as what I see
is blue because I have different mental processes so they're making some kind of assumption that's that's just plain silly another thing is the idea that I have privileged access as some philosophers call call it to my thoughts and yet we all know that a certain person uh has a friend uh John has a friend Mary John can better predict how Mary will react to a certain situation than Mary can this isn't always the case but it's frequently the case and the philosopher gil Gilbert riyle in his book the concept of mind has a wonderful attack
on this idea that a person has a special private access to their own mind well each part of my brain does have better access to some parts of my brain than to someone else's but not my much better and uh I think it's just exaggerated I do not have access to good descriptions of my 20 or 30 models of myself uh I only think I have access and uh the part of my brain that talks doesn't know very much about what happens in the rest so the idea that there's a central eye who has the
experience yes I think is uh a typical case of taking a common set concept and not really realizing that it has no good technical Counterpoint counterpart uh but it has 20 or 30 different meanings and you keep switching from one to the other without knowing it so it all seems like one thing so this one thing that it seems this first-person experience that we call Consciousness but is is this experience this this apparently immediate experience assuming what you say that it is really the the sum of these 20 30 however many different components in some
different way is that sufficient to undercut the argument that Consciousness is a a defeater of materialism that the there is something beyond the physical world I think when we make machines that have these multiple levels of organization we'll find that when if the machine manages if we manage to make it uh have the same sort of structure that the human brain has we don't know enough about without that yet to do it that it will report the same sorts of things and when it says I see blue we'll be able to see all the processes
that this involveed and we'll also see that it doesn't involve much understanding of what that process is and so it seems very mysterious and unphysical if you don't know how it works like when Houdini or uh pan and Teller make an elephant disappear uh then you say this is not physical it's impossible when you know how the magic trick works then the sense of wonder goes away although you might still remember how it puzzled you once so the fundamental question again is when we analyze all these pieces of Consciousness is there anything left over that
allows us to go beyond the physical world well the physical world is everything we know and uh if somebody believes that there's another world that's uh that we can't see or measure they're entitled to their opinion but I think uh the more you develop that idea the more cubic centimeters of your brain you're wasting uh with questions that uh don't make any sense and can't be answered if there's if there's another Universe somewhere that doesn't interact with this one uh then it's not physical and it's silly to worry about it however if there's another Universe
with a thinking machine and it's it has invisible wires connected to your brain that change how you behave then we want to build new instruments to find it Well the the argument says that that that Consciousness is is so unique because of this first- person experience that it cannot be explain no matter how you you look at the brain in terms of its neuronal level or the systems level or however you want to explain it there's always going to be something left over and that which is left over is this first person experience well I
think the first person experience comes when uh maybe you're three or four months old or six months or nine months whatever it is when you notice that there are other people who do some of the same things you do but I can move my hand and I can't move your hand and at some point the baby recognizes there's a big difference and it makes a concept of the self which is my body and a little later my mind and that's the uh that's what they call the identity and the self and no matter how old
you get unless you've made a lot of new psychological theories and so forth you're stuck with that one and it seems very permanent and immediate and and unchangeable because it's all you've got when you were a baby it was this few little lumps of cells that say that's me and you don't you never grow up so you don't need anything more other than what we have in our craniums to explain Consciousness well I'd hate to uh to feel that there's some other world and I mean I worked very hard to become a good scientist and
I studied mathematics for many years and finally proved some theorems no one else did and I felt this was a a great thing it was wonderful and uh it was hard work now if somebody comes along and says Uh there's a little oyster in the universe and you're the Pearl and some Creator gave you this ability well that's very demeaning I don't want to be dissed by saying my virtues come from a soul I worked hard and our whole culture worked very hard to get its ideas I didn't invent calculus Archimedes made a big step
then there were 2,000 years of nonsense and uh then Along Came Galileo and newon and finally he got calculus into and liet into workable form so the idea of a soul seems to be very demeaning it's saying nothing we do has any consequences there's someone else just dropping these little gifts on us terrible idea what would happen if you believed it you wouldn't do anything
