Skip to content

Like this? Share it!

  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share on Email
Closer To Truth
  • Watch
    • Seasons & EpisodesWatch complete episodes as aired on public television
    • Curated PlaylistsExplore collections of videos curated by our team
    • ProjectsDiscover collaborations with leading institutions
    • ContributorsMeet the greatest thinkers exploring the deepest questions
    • CTT ChatsWatch candid conversations with the brightest minds on the boldest ideas
    • Roundtable ArchivesView roundtable discussions from our early years
  • Topics
    • Cosmos, Life, Consciousness, Meaning: Explore the fundamental questions of existence.Topic Guide
    • All Topics
      • CosmosExplore cosmology, physics, and the fundamentals of existence
        • Back
        • All Cosmos
        • Deep Laws of Nature
          • Back
          • All Deep Laws of Nature
          • Cosmic Fundamentals
          • Time and Space-Time
          • Quantum Theory
          • Philosophy of Science
          • Complexity and Emergence
          • Mathematics as Fundamental?
          • Information as Fundamental?
          • Universe as Simulation?
          • Deep Discoveries in Science
        • Vast Cosmos
          • Back
          • All Vast Cosmos
          • Cosmic Immensity
          • Cosmic Beginnings
          • Cosmic Structure
          • Multiple Universes (Multiverse)
          • Black Holes, Dark Energy, Dark Matter
        • Our Special Universe
          • Back
          • All Our Special Universe
          • Fine-Tuning of the Universe?
          • Fine-Tuning the Universe for Life & Mind?
          • Breathtaking Universe
          • Alien Intelligences?
          • Far Future of the Universe
        • Breakthroughs
          • Back
          • All Breakthroughs
          • Breakthroughs in Science
          • Breakthroughs in Mathematics
        • Science and Religion
          • Back
          • All Science and Religion
          • Science vs. Religion?
          • Science and God
          • How Science and Religion Think
          • The New Atheism
          • Limits of Science
        • Mystery of Existence
          • Back
          • All Mystery of Existence
          • The Mystery of Existence
          • The Mystery of Laws & Cosmos
          • Metaphysics of Cosmos
          • Why Anything at All?
      • LifeJoin our in-depth exploration of life on planet earth and beyond.
        • Back
        • All Life
        • Philosophy of Biology
          • Back
          • All Philosophy of Biology
          • Why Philosophy of Biology?
          • Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology
          • Philosophy of Genes and Information
          • Philosophy of Evolution and Religion
        • What is Life?
          • Back
          • All What is Life?
          • What is Life?
          • What is Death?
        • Human Biology
          • Back
          • All Human Biology
          • Human Nature & Uniqueness
          • Evolutionary Culture and Ethics
          • Sex and Gender
          • Biology of Race
          • Medicine and Healthcare
          • Biological Futures
        • Life in the Cosmos
          • Back
          • All Life in the Cosmos
          • Life in the Cosmos
        • Biological Concepts
          • Back
          • All Biological Concepts
          • Mathematics and Biology
          • Deception
          • Plant Sentience
      • MindSearch mysteries of mind and individual awareness
        • Back
        • All Mind
        • Mind-Body Problems
          • Back
          • All Mind-Body Problems
          • The Mind-Body Problem
          • Brain Structure and Function
          • Brain Explains Mind?
          • Elements of Mind
        • Consciousness
          • Back
          • All Consciousness
          • Mystery of Consciousness
          • Landscape of Consciousness
          • Consciousness as Emergent
          • Consciousness as All Physical?
          • States of Consciousness
          • Sleep and Dreams
          • Purpose of Consciousness?
          • Metaphysics of Consciousness
        • Persons
          • Back
          • All Persons
          • Persons and Selves
          • Personal Identity
          • Life After Death?
          • Souls?
          • Human Uniqueness
          • Creativity
          • Music
          • Epistemology
          • Belief Systems
          • Mind and Society
          • People and Society
        • Free Will
          • Back
          • All Free Will
          • Mystery of Free Will
          • Philosophy of Free Will
          • Free Will and Consciousness
          • Science of Free Will
          • Free Will and Morality
          • Theology of Free Will
        • Extrasensory Perception
          • Back
          • All Extrasensory Perception
          • ESP and New Realities?
          • ESP and the Nonphysical?
        • Art Seeking Understanding
          • Back
          • All Art Seeking Understanding
          • Aesthetic Cognitivism
          • Art and Philosophy
          • Neuroscience/Cognitive Science of Art
          • Neuroscience/Cognitive Science of Music
          • Art and God
          • Art and Religion
          • Art and Culture
          • Mind, Art, Transcendence
          • Art Seeking Understanding Projects
      • MeaningSeek whether God exists through diverse perspectives
        • Back
        • All Meaning
        • Philosophy of Religion
          • Back
          • All Philosophy of Religion
          • Concepts of God
          • Alternative Concepts of God
          • Faith and Belief
          • Conflict Among Religions
          • Philosophy and Analytic Theology
          • Contemporary Theological Engagement
          • How Philosophy Informs Religion
          • Religion Without God
          • Eastern Traditions and the Big Questions
          • Global Philosophy of Religion
        • Existence of God
          • Back
          • All Existence of God
          • Arguing God's Existence
          • Philosophical Arguments For God
          • Experiential Arguments For God
          • Arguments Against God
        • Attributes of God
          • Back
          • All Attributes of God
          • God's Nature?
          • God's Essence?
          • God's Powers?
          • God and Time?
        • God as Creator
          • Back
          • All God as Creator
          • God The Creator?
          • God's Interactions?
          • God's World?
        • Ultimate Destinies
          • Back
          • All Ultimate Destinies
          • God's Knowledge and Future Events?
          • Judgment (Heaven, Hell)?
          • Resurrection?
          • Eschatology (End Times)?
          • Eternal Life?
          • Search for Meaning
  • News
    • All NewsStay up-to-date with the latest from Closer To Truth
    • Book ExcerptsExplore recently authored books from our contributors
    • PerspectivesRead essays and articles from our community
  • About
    • About Closer To TruthWe are a digital-media nonprofit and TV series
    • The TV SeriesWhere to watch on PBS stations nationwide
    • DonateDonate now to keep our content free!
    • Meet the TeamMeet the host and team behind Closer To Truth
    • PartnershipsLearn about our partners and collaborators
    • Support Closer To TruthWays to engage with and support our work
    • PodcastListen on your favorite podcast player
    • StoreBuy official Closer To Truth merchandise
    • YouTubeSubscribe to Closer To Truth on YouTube
  • Donate
Search
  • Login
  • Join
  • Watch
    • EpisodesWatch complete episodes as aired on public television
    • Curated PlaylistsExplore collections of videos curated by our team
    • ProjectsDiscover collaborations with leading institutions
    • ContributorsMeet the greatest thinkers exploring the deepest questions
    • CTT ChatsWatch chats with the brightest minds on the boldest ideas
    • RoundtablesView roundtable discussions from our early years
  • Topics
    • Topic GuideCosmos, Consciousness, Meaning: Join us as we explore the fundamental questions of existence.
    • CosmosExplore cosmology, physics, and the fundamentals of existence
    • MindSearch mysteries of mind and individual awareness
    • MeaningSeek whether God exists through diverse perspectives
  • News
    • The Latest
  • About
    • About Closer To TruthWe are a digital-media nonprofit and TV series
    • TV SeriesWhere to watch on PBS stations nationwide
    • Meet the TeamMeet our host and our team
    • DonateDonate now to keep our content free!
    • PartnershipsLearn about CTT’s partners and collaborators
    • Support Closer to TruthWays to engage with and support our work
    • PodcastListen on your favorite podcast player
    • StoreBuy official Closer To Truth merchandise
    • YouTubeSubscribe to Closer To Truth on YouTube
    • FAQLearn about Closer to Truth membership
  • Login
  • Join

video

Topic Series

Paul Davies

  • Watch Next
Cover image for Can Philosophy Discern Sex and Gender?

Can Philosophy Discern Sex and Gender?

Cover image for What Does Transhumanism Foreshadow?

What Does Transhumanism Foreshadow?

Cover image for Evolution vs. Religion: Anything New?

Evolution vs. Religion: Anything New?

Cover image for How did Cognition and Emotion Evolve?

How did Cognition and Emotion Evolve?

Cover image for Big Questions in Free Will Documentary

Big Questions in Free Will Documentary

Cover image for What is Human Nature?

What is Human Nature?

  • Details
  • Transcripts
  • Formats
    • Share
Featured In

  • Physics of Consciousness
Contributors

Paul Davies

Paul Davies works on astrophysics/cosmology, cosmic origins, time, life origins,...
“Robert Lawrence
uhn” Paul, we’re at the FQXI seminar, the Physics of the Observer, and one of the topics is consciousness, the application of physics to try to explain consciousness. This has been my obsession for my whole sentient life. I did my doctorate in neuroscience. At that time, you know, 50 years ago, I thought we could, you know, neuronal circuits and neurophysiology, neuroanatomy. You know, they made a lot of progress, but did not explain consciousness and now we have a new generation of people who think that physics, whether it’s the quantum physics level or mathematical mechanisms, are needed to explain this first person phenomenal experience of consciousness. How do you evaluate these new efforts through fundamental physics and mathematics to explain consciousness?
Paul Davies
First, I should say it’s still a deep mystery. We would like to be able to say there’s something particular about what’s going on in this complex system in here that is not going on in that complex system over there, that this is conscious, that isn’t, but what exactly is it about that? The use of the word system is critical here, that I don’t believe and I don’t think many of my colleagues would believe that, say, an atom is individually conscious and that it’s a matter of adding up all lots of little bits of consciousness to get a lot of it. It’s got something to do with the system and the complexity of the system or the way it hangs together as a whole, that, if this system is the brain. And so, that’s a very difficult concept to get into physics because all of physics is really formulated at the fundamental level in terms of local things; that is, say, the particle has a force acting on it at that particular point. That’s something and we understand behavior at that level. When we’re into something which involves a system, which is many degrees of freedom and distributed throughout space and time, we’re wanting to describe that at a fundamental level, well, then that’s a difficult thing to, to write down equations for, but at the moment, there is a particular point of view, which has been put forward by Giulio Tononi, that somehow we can characterize the wholeness of the system, like a brain, say, in terms of a particular mathematical quantity, which equals integrated information. And here we have a really key point. I think everybody would agree that one of the things that brains do is process information. We get, sense data comes in, and this information swirls around in the brain, and then sometimes leads to agency or action. So, that information processing is important, but there have been great advances in trying to understand the behavior of information in networks and that you can ask, well, where is the information processing taking place? Is it just in a lot of little places, like individual neurons, and that somehow the brain is the sum total of it, or are there collective degrees of freedom or collective modes in the brain which is doing the heavy lifting of the information processing? Now, this is, this adage, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, can that be quantified? That we would say the brain is a good example. No neuron in my brain is conscious, yet the brain, as a whole, has consciousness. How do we capture that notion of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? Well, Tononi has a candidate measurement. It may not be the right one, but it’s a stab, trying to capture that idea mathematically and I’m very much drawn to that because, for the first time, we’ve got a mathematical quantity which is defined on the whole system, which captures the two aspects. One is its complexity, but the other is its inability to be decomposed into the parts without losing the essential thing that you’re looking for. I’d like to import that particular quantity into quantum physics to tackle the measurement of observer problem of quantum physics. I think that this is a great application of that idea.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn
So I can understand, possibly, how a test like that could decide whether something is consciousness…is conscious or not conscious. That, that I can follow. What I’d have difficulty was [sic] is going to the next step and saying that that is consciousness because it, it gets back to the old, so-called identity theory.
Paul Davies
Right.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn
So, if I have stubbed my toe, I have impulses along the C fibers to my brain, and people have to say that the feeling of pain is those C fiber firings, and they seem like such radically different categories, it’s hard to see that one is the same. I have the same problem here because whatever that structure is, how does that create the phenomenal experience?
Paul Davies
Right. And that’s entirely justified because what this is, is a quantitative measure of the degree of consciousness, but it doesn’t, in my view, address what you’re describing, which David Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness, the fact that it is like something to experience the redness of red, and it’s quite different from the sound of a bell, or the greenness of green or, you know, the smell of a meal. These are all very different internally. These so-called qualia which attach to these conscious experiences is something which is outside of the scope of what I’ve just been saying and that, that remains a mystery.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn
And that’s why David Chalmers and others have increasingly moving [sic] towards a panpsychist approach to reality, where there is some protoconsciousness in every, in every particle, every wave function, that somehow when, a combination problem they have, but when you bring it together in some form, you create it. But because they’re, they, they cannot make sense of any identity theory, that the phenomenal experience being identical with anything that you say that happens in the brain, or physics, or measures; therefore, you have to postulate something completely outside of that.
Paul Davies
Right. They want a dualist view of the world and I have some sympathy with that. I don’t like panpsychism. I don’t like atoms are a little bit conscious, but I do think that we will almost certainly have to add something to systems that are above a certain threshold of complexity, have a particular amount of integrated information that we, that the qualia, the internal experiences, I don’t think can be derived from the physics. You can’t…physics deals with particles, and forces, and things like that. The mental world deals with sensations, and thoughts, and impressions, and if you open up my head, you just see a lot of atoms and things. You don’t see thoughts, and sensations, and impressions. And so, these two may be correlated, but at the end of the day, I don’t see that you can ever explain my internal personal experience or the redness of red in terms of electrons and signals and physical forces.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn
What’s the implication of that? Does that mean that your so-called substance dualist is some other thing that exists in reality, that has to somehow work with the physical world?
Paul Davies
I think there is something else that exists, yes. Where I would part company with some people is to suppose that this other thing could have an independent existence, floating around, sort of free of the system in which it’s instantiated. I think it’s part and parcel of the phenomenon, the complexity that we would associate with brains and, who knows, maybe computer systems that might be conscious. I don’t think there’s anything particularly magical about the, you know, the flesh and blood stuff. But I think to, to fully explain the world as we experience it, which includes the qualia – for me, I mean, I can’t say for you, but certainly for me – then there has to be something in it, in addition to the particles and the forces, yes.
  • Short Video
  • Long Video

Watch Next

Cover image for Can Philosophy Discern Sex and Gender?

Sexual questions abound. What is “normal” sexual behavior in light of diverse sexual variations? LGBTQ+ issues? Is sex in animal models relevant for human sexuality? A...

video

Can Philosophy Discern Sex and Gender?

Episode 7

Season 27

26:47

Watch

Cover image for What Does Transhumanism Foreshadow?

Humanity’s future is now framed by artificial intelligence (AI) and increasing interventions in the body to enhance features and functions. This is transhumanism....

video

What Does Transhumanism Foreshadow?

Episode 8

Season 25

26:47

Watch

Cover image for Evolution vs. Religion: Anything New?

Two kinds of questions probe evolution vs. religion. The first explores discrepancies, even contradictions, between the science of evolution and the beliefs of religion. The...

video

Evolution vs. Religion: Anything New?

Episode 6

Season 27

26:47

Watch

Cover image for How did Cognition and Emotion Evolve?

What can evolution reveal about the developmental history of thinking and feeling? How did cognition and emotion (affect) co-develop over evolutionary time? Can evolution...

video

How did Cognition and Emotion Evolve?

Episode 5

Season 27

26:47

Watch

Cover image for Big Questions in Free Will Documentary

Do we have free will? After so many centuries of debate by so many great thinkers, can we still make progress in answering this question? That’s the goal of the Big...

video

Big Questions in Free Will Documentary

1:37:06

Watch

Cover image for What is Human Nature?

What is “human” nature? While human beings are animals, we believe we are special, radically different from other animals. Why? What traits are unique to humans? Are we...

video

What is Human Nature?

Episode 4

Season 27

26:47

Watch


Become a Member

Get free access to exclusive content and more.

  • facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • Watch on YouTube
  • Find us on PBS
  • Donate
  • Contact Us

Policies Terms © Closer To Truth. All rights reserved Website by Visceral