Andres Gomez-Emilsson: The Science of Engineered Conscious States
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
Curt Jaimungal
4.6 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2025
⏱️ 175 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | What's the most important problem for a scientific theory of consciousness to solve? |
| 0:04.6 | Oh my goodness. That's a wonderful question. I think I would have difficulty prioritizing just one. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm going to say there's four that any scientific theory of consciousness must be able to satisfy, |
| 0:19.2 | which is, first of all, any theory of consciousness has to explain |
| 0:23.4 | why consciousness exists to begin with. Second, it has to explain what's called the palette |
| 0:31.3 | problem. Essentially, what are all of the qualia values and varieties out there and the interrelations |
| 0:37.4 | between them. |
| 0:38.2 | You know, why is there the blueness of blue and, you know, the way as a rose smells. |
| 0:43.8 | Like, what is that? And how are they connected to each other? |
| 0:47.2 | The third is what are the causal properties of consciousness? |
| 0:51.4 | Like, in other words, why are we conscious, you know, from a biological |
| 0:55.1 | evolutionary perspective? What kind of function is it playing? And then the fourth one is the binding |
| 1:01.0 | problem. You know, how is it possible that, you know, pieces of information can actually be put |
| 1:05.9 | together into unified moments of experience? And for me, you know, these are kind of like four hard |
| 1:11.9 | constraints that any theory of consciousness must be able to satisfy. And I think what is |
| 1:16.6 | very common, though, is for theories of consciousness to only really care about a few of them |
| 1:22.4 | or sometimes like none of them at all. But I think like, yeah, I mean, it's sort of like, if you want to go to the moon, you've got to be able to not only, you know, have the escape velocity to get there, you also, you know, need an airtight container, right, like, so that you don't asphyxiate on the way there. And I think of it something like that. You know, there's like a series of things, theory of consciousness must be able to do. And if you only do a few of them, it's not really a theory of consciousness. Okay, we're going to get to your background, who you are, how you got interested in the field of consciousness. But I noticed you didn't talk about the hard problem, nor the boundary problem. I'm curious as to why. |
| 2:01.7 | Yeah, great question. I tend to, in a sense, like, lump together the binding problem and the |
| 2:06.2 | boundary problem, even though legitimately you can think of them as different sub-problems. |
| 2:11.4 | The reason I do this is that I sort of think of them as equivalent just in different ontologies. So if you start out in kind of |
| 2:20.5 | the common sense view of the universe where the universe is made of atoms and forces, then typically |
| 2:27.4 | you will think of it as like the binding problem. It's like how is it possible that atoms, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Curt Jaimungal, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Curt Jaimungal and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.