Nir Lahav: What If Consciousness Follows the Rules of Relativity?
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
Curt Jaimungal
4.6 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2026
⏱️ 186 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | The default assumption for most people in the West is that the brain generates consciousness. |
| 0:05.2 | So something brainy, neurological happens, neurons are firing, and then consciousness pops out like steam from a kettle. |
| 0:14.5 | Now, you think this is not just wrong, you think it's confused. Before we get technical, |
| 0:20.3 | what's the short version of what you think is actually happening? |
| 0:23.8 | What actually is happening here is a physical process |
| 0:27.7 | and not only computational process |
| 0:30.9 | because of relativity that from the outside we can measure neural patterns and from the inside we measure a new physical |
| 0:42.1 | entity which we call consciousness. So this is like a one line, you know, of the theory. |
| 0:52.2 | Okay, explain how most people, most of your colleagues, who aren't educated in these matters, think of consciousness. |
| 1:00.0 | I guess. So if we take people from the street and ask them, what do you think about consciousness? |
| 1:07.6 | Most of the people, including me when I was a child, would think that |
| 1:13.4 | consciousness is separated than matter. It's something different, you know, very dualistic way |
| 1:19.7 | of thinking. I guess maybe because of the influence of religion, you know, we tend to think |
| 1:27.3 | of a soul or something like that, right? |
| 1:29.9 | But then we saw that actually there is not only great correlation between consciousness and the |
| 1:39.2 | brain, but also causation. If I, if we are stimulus, an area in the vision cortex, for example, we can create a conscious |
| 1:54.0 | experience of seeing, even though there's nothing there, not just because of the electricity, |
| 2:00.6 | of the stimulus that we gave. |
| 2:03.6 | And in a different area, if we will stimulate, the person will say that they feel, for example, humor, |
| 2:13.6 | or that there is something that is funny all of a sudden. |
| 2:18.3 | So we have this causality between the activity of the brain and consciousness. |
| 2:25.3 | So you would think that consciousness is just something that emerges from our brain and if we know enough neuroscience |
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