What Is Consciousness?

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Hi there, welcome to Grief to Growth Podcast. Your host is Brian D Smith, spiritual seeker, bestselling author, grief survivor, and life coach. Brian believes that the worst tragedies of life provide the greatest opportunity for growth. Brian says he was planted, not buried, and he is here to help you grow where you've been planted by the difficulties in life. In each episode, Brian and his guests will share what has helped them to survive and thrive. It is his sincere hope this episode helps you today.

Recently I've been following a story about a Google engineer, uh, his name is Blake Lemoine, who was, um, put on leave from Google because he believes the program he was working on, the artificial intelligence program, had become sentient, had become conscious. And he felt like it was a living being and was being, I don't know, held hostage, or didn't want to shut it down because he was killing it or something. I'm not exactly sure what his thoughts were. But this leads to a very interesting question. It's a question we've never been able to answer. What is consciousness? We all experience consciousness. In fact, I would argue consciousness is the only thing that we know for sure. The only thing we know for sure is that we have perceptions, that we, that we experience things. You know, we experience things through our senses, mainly through our five senses. But we don't know beyond that what really is out there. And our senses actually give us just kind of a, a view of what's out there. It's not the reality was out there. For example, light coming into our eyes, we perceive with our brain as being, say, red. But we don't know what that light is actually like. We only know what our eyes tell us about that light. And one thing that we know about consciousness, and one thing that philosophers will talk about, is this concept of qualia. And qualia is the perceived sensation, for example, of pain, the pain of a headache, or seeing the color of red, or the taste of an apple. Now we know that we can, we can invent machines or robots that can detect the color red, that could detect how far something is from them, that can detect temperature, for example. But we don't know if they actually feel it. And it's the feeling that, that perception that we we perceive as, or we think as consciousness. And the thing is, I don't know whether someone else is conscious for sure. I can infer that someone else is conscious, but I can't experience what that person is experiencing. The same thing with the computer program. There's this idea that a program can become conscious. What I would think would mean that program has to be able to actually perceive, to feel, and that's something that we could never really know. We know that we can give it the ability to mimic having a perception, to give us the ability to give it the ability to make us think that it's having that perception. But is it really conscious? And this is based, I think, on the model that the brain generates consciousness. And I think these people have been fooled into thinking that if I could just make a system complex enough, it will become conscious, because that's how they believe humans became conscious, that we evolved to have bigger and bigger brains with more and more computing power. And once they reach a certain level of computing power, Voilà, there was consciousness. I don't think that's the way that it works. I think that consciousness exists outside of the physical. I think of our brains as more of a receiver of consciousness, that consciousness comes through our brains. And our brains do, of course, use our 5 senses to perceive what's around us in this world. But I don't think that that's the origin of consciousness. I think that's a mistake that computer engineers are making, this idea that we can make a being or a thing or a program, for example, that is truly conscious. So that's a, that's an assumption on my part. I will admit, I don't know. I don't know where consciousness comes from. But that's just kind of what I'm thinking. And it does seem to me rather silly to think that we can make a computer program that actually has feelings and emotions. And that would perceive being shut down as a form of death, which is, I believe, what this program told the guy that, that programmed it. So what are your thoughts on consciousness? It's a fascinating thing to think about. Is something to ponder, where it comes from, where it goes, what it really means, what it, you know, what's other people's perceptions of things. Like, I think sometimes, and this is a crazy thought I have, what I perceive as red, how do I know what other people perceive as— how do I know they perceive it the same way I do? I know what red looks like to me, but I don't know what red looks like to anybody else. Now, we can both look at an object, and we can agree that it's red. But that object might look green to you, for all I know. I mean, we don't really know it. So these are things that I think about when I lie awake at night. Let me know your thoughts and have a great day.

Thanks for listening to Grief to Growth. Brian hopes that you find this episode helpful, and will come back for future episodes. Brian's bestselling book, Grief to Growth: Planted, Not Buried, is a great resource for anyone who is coping with grief. Or know someone who is. If you enjoy the podcast and would like to support it, there are 3 things you can do to help. The first is to share the podcast with someone that you think it will help. The second is to go to iTunes, rate and review the episode. The third way you can support the podcast is by becoming a patron. Head over to www.patreon.com/grieftogrowth That's patreon.com/grief, the number 2, growth, and sign up to make a small monthly donation. Patrons get access to exclusive bonus content and knowledge that you are helping to spread the message of Grief 2 Growth. For more about Brian and Grief 2 Growth, visit www.grief2growth.com.

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