8. Susan Blackmore – Brain, Mind, and Consciousness – Skeptics Society 2005
This is from the 2005 Skeptics Conference where leading scientists discuss issues that strike at the very heart of the matter, our brains. Topics range from morality to evolution to consciousness to life after death. It’s an absolutely amazing collection of lectures.
As with all of my videos thus far, I do not actually hold the copyright for this material. I am only uploading it here to give it the audience it deserves. If I should be asked to remove it, I will.
However, you should do yourself a favor, and do the entire skeptics community a favor and purchase this from the source: http://shop.skeptic.com/merchant.mvc?Store_Code=SS&Screen=PROD&Product_Code=av560DVD
Or at the very least, donate: http://www.skeptic.com/donate/
I hope you enjoy.
29 Responses to “8. Susan Blackmore – Brain, Mind, and Consciousness – Skeptics Society 2005”
This was Just absolutely mind blowing to watch. And that’s why I think that ultimately mindfulness practice will eventually wind up substituting religion, in the more developed and enlightened areas of the world, of course…
I know a lot of people who keep running around in circles asking the same questions Over and over again, concentrating in the “spiritual” realm, when the answer is is right here in this very skeptic moment!!!
What is witnessing?
Interesting comments, I am consciousness and do not feel I wish to nor have to leave self, I believe the author is confusing consciousness with personal baggage which we all have, to get there is to rid self of baggage not escaping because we cannot escape self, nor should we wish to. given how amazing we all are Kindred,
I liked the fridge door analogy as most have considered this at some point, we cannot observe the self and consider this at same time, to fully enter into our consciousness would be to be fully entered into our consciousness, nothing more as it is our essence <3
If consciousness is an illusion and if we throw out the show and the audience (her words—emphasis on “show,” my words, because it strikes me that she’s quite a showwoman), then this talk, the video of it, and Susan Blackmore herself are all illusions and therefore pointless. Listen to this carefully. There are fallacies all over the place. If there is no consciousness, how can there be attention? Without consciousness, I suppose there could be “hearing,” but could there be “listening”? She talks about “knowing” things. Without consciousness, how can you know things? She destroys her argument with her test of the audience when she asks them, “Are you conscious now?” She says “we’re assuming that . . .”; “it’s always like that when we look”; “trying to look into the darkness.” If there’s no consciousness, who’s trying? Don’t be bamboozled.
Her assertions imply that she herself is merely an automaton. I’m glad to hear that she admits she could be wrong.
What if time is just away of perceiving the “frames” (or
“nows” of British physicist Julian Barbour”s time)? Then the parts of Blackmore’s argument that are based on time experiments completely fall apart.
Blackmore is as wrapped up in her delusional belief system as much as any religious zealot I’ve ever heard. Different brand of nonsense, but nonsense none the less. Cheers.
Well, is the usual stuff one expects from the ‘skeptics’, she raises nothing that worries me. However, there is one odd point she seems not quite clear on, or is just being disingenuous with her intellectual gymnastics these people seem to like, she claims she is NOT saying consciousness is not real but that it’s illusory. Excuse Me !
Definition of Illusory is;
adjective
based on illusion; not real.
“she knew the safety of her room was illusory”
synonyms: delusory, delusional, delusive; illusionary, imagined, imaginary, fancied, non-existent, unreal, hallucinatory; sham, hollow, deceptive, deceiving, false, fallacious, fake, bogus, mistaken, erroneous, misleading, misguided, untrue, specious, fanciful, notional, chimerical.
As for the example she give of the Magician Randy, ok, that one example was fake, but not withstanding do you think that really has any baring on this subject ? I will add that many have approached Randy for the prize of or $500,000 or whatever it is that he’s offered for evidence on of the paranormal and you know what, he will not even reply to or look at any claims by some very serious researchers, he just dismisses all claims ‘a priory’ Pfft!
Also the famous experiment she mentions , haha. She touches on the problem of free will with that one and a subject which, imho, she does not have the intellect to deal with adequately, remember, she is famous from TV NOT one of the worlds great intellects by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever. In that experiment with the hand moving it shows brain activity before the person shouts out the position of their hand, that’s not a problem for any brain correlates take time to appear after a conscious decision and so forth, plus it is a rather old experiment not taken as proof for the non existence of consciousness anymore.
Look at it this way, they don’t know when consciousness first arises, they don’t know the necessary & sufficient causes of consciousness, the don’t know what the neurological correlates of consciousness are, they don’t know what consciousness is, they don’t know how to measure it or what it’s function or nature is…and yet they claim a brain mind equivalence & that consciousness does not exist, or in Blackmore’s case that it’s ‘illusory’ !
Oh c’mon, do people really accept this as a refutation of consciousness,. Back to the Behaviourists eh !?
Consciousness is not a complete illusion, but free will is. It seems that Blackmore does not see the difference… It is also true that many different visual illusions exists, but that does not mean that consciousness is an illusion.l Sure you can say that conscious visions are a part of consciousness, and because there are conscious visual illusions, then consciousness is an illusion. But then consciousness is only partly an illusion, but not a complete illusion, because only some parts of consciousness are illusions to some degree.
Susan Blackmore – Brain, Mind, and Consciousness.
I’ve noticed when some people don’t get something, they become terribly offended. Instead of accepting that something is a little bit beyond them and perhaps (if they wish) they should try finding more knowledge or apply more thought to the subject, they seem to think they’re being lied to or conned.
not an intelligent woman.not enough solid thinking.the fact is we have different levels of consciousness.our brains and bodies think without our awareness.we are not aware of this.the reaction of the crowd to her speech is an instinctive reaction.that instinctive reaction is one level of consciousness should slow down her thinking process and just feel things or feel nothing.trees and plants have a stronger consciousness than humans.because their not encumbered by silly thoughts.our brain and the conscious thoughts we have blocks us from reaching our deepest levels of consciousness.some tibetan buddhist monks have deeper understanding of the levels with their different meditation practices.this woman could never reach a high level in these practices.way too scattered thinking.same for that laughing crowd of skeptics.our own consciousness itself is free but unreachable by our thinking activities. at the end of her speech she admits she has been studying.i should have waited till the end of her speech.deep in our minds,way beyond our thoughts lays our future as humans.yes that consciousness will be our saviour. it will allow us to mind travel.explore the universe and beyond.throw away boundaries.religion without religion.endless possibilities that consciousness is way towards safety.we are actually guided by it despite our self-destructiveness. that consciousness conducts evolution.i would have to give a long explanation.computers one day will understand and translate consciousness
Just too “cute” to watch – sorry.
Tom Campbell’s MBT satisfactorily explains all of this
what a moron.
R.i.p Carl Sagan
That’s a boring story. Long on wind, short on evidence.
Only trust yourself.
We are all animals, though some are far less aware than others.
if you could see into the darkness you would find complacency ….
The lady is a very good communicator, or even actress , but she failed quite a lot on clarifying the subject of consciousness. Almost everything she said, and the inferences and sugestions made, can be turned in the opposite direction of the materialistic reducionism of consciousness to vision and brain, that she is embracing now. And, at the end, the call to meditation, or mindfulness, surely was a treathening joke for some of his skeptics friends in the audience…
Not only is the idealist position that consciousness is fundamental more parsimonious than physicalism, but it also has no hard problem of consciousness. Occam’s Razor favors the idealist. There is no reason to default to the idea that consciousness is a function of the brain, or that we live in a material universe outside of mind.
There is no conclusive scientific evidence that ghosts are real or unreal. Rather they defy scientific categorization and are best left dismissed until further notice. I am a non-drug using atheist of sound body and mind who has encountered for lack of a better word: “a ghost”, along with two other like-minded friends of mine. We all thought it was a fluke or a momentary lapse of reason or we were going crazy (hallucination in unison), but after much debate we simply left the topic alone and ignored it. Ghosts/spirits are common things in history and in every culture and society. Countless people have reports or stories about them>
Q: Am I conscious?
A: Conscious of what?
Unfortunately there is a bottomless pit that we fall into as soon as we talk about knowing something and presenting evidence of any sort. Try to find something wrong in the following statement – besides some definitions of time and the word ‘thing’.(1) Either all things that occur have a cause or(2) at least some things that occur do not have a cause.If (1) is correct then we have no choice in what we do or think. If (2) is correct there are these totally spontaneuos events happening in the universe that seem to mess up this causality thing described by (1). We (whatever ‘we’ might mean) have absolutely no control over things that were always bound to happen (case (1)) or things that occur randomly (case (2)).The bottomless pit is a prison we live in becuase cases 1 and 2 lead to the conclusion that we have absolutely no control of what we think or believe (or do), which makes any kind of ‘intelectual’ enquiry into anything at all utterly futile. I simply cannot help write these words – it was meant to be.The observation that what we find out about the world seems to help us – so we must be doing something right, for example, progress in medicine is an observation that we cannot avoid. We were always going to ‘improve’ medical care and we were always going to think ‘it is a good thing’ and we were always going to think ‘yes we are making the right decisions and science seems to be working.’ But we always end up with the circular argument.If you look a lectures on determinism you find quite a few that absolutely cannot accept that we have no choice. They scratch and scrape as they fall into the bottomless pit. Watch those videos carefully to see the point the argument starts to revolve around pre-conceptions – and unwilliness to accept that we can never know anything at all.Well I end on that happy note.
Booooooooooooooooooo! Susan Blackmore!!! Tired Old COW!!!!!!
I have come to hate this woman so much. That book of hers is a frantic monstrosity that has been haunting me for months now. Once I am done with the exam it’s going straight in the trash.
14 billion years of Universal existence, 5 billion years of Earthly evolution, and with respect, i find it somewhat surprising how this woman after a conservative 50 years can speak with such determination of her conclusion of everything, and how this revolutionary thinker can speak with such a jovial and at times sarcastic nature towards the very same problem people such as Albert Einstein spent his whole life trying to comprehend, yet still fell short.
This is yet another example from Blackmore of the reductive materialist belief system (matter is fundamental) taken to its logical, yet absurd extreme conclusion: consciousness is an illusion. I have to admit this one surprises me a little bit. And it makes me wonder if it is not some sort of subconscious reaction to the opposite cosmological model of eastern traditions: consciousness is fundamental / matter is an illusion – which coincides with many cosmological models from modern physicists like Max Planck, John Hagelin, Tom Campbell, Amit Goswami, etc., who describe the reality is an illusion concept in terms like: matter is derivative from consciousness, matter is a subset of consciousness, this material world is a virtual reality generated and “driven” by consciousness.
Blacknore’s consciousness is an illusion (delusion) fits right in with many of the other absurd reductive materialist conclusions, like science’s ridiculous version of a creation myth (something from nothing, ala Lawrence Krauss), or the free will is an illusion delusion, (because if reality is a deterministic machine, then free will cannot exist). It will be interesting to see what else they come up with.
Cheers
I used to believe that consciousness couldn’t exist without a brain. Now I believe consciousness resides in another dimension but needs the brain to interact within this universe.
I’m interested in learning that impulse in this experiment precedes conscious choice. I’m curious where that supposition leads? Is it that my impulse to watch Susan on youtube precedes my conscious choice to watch her? That her impulse to be a skeptic of consciousness precedes her choice to be a skeptic of consciousness and she only thinks she is choosing to be a skeptic? If the impulse to reject her argument precedes my conscious choice to reject her argument then it makes her lecture irrelevant – something that does not make any sense to do. If everyone listening to her, according to her, will physiologically choose to accept/reject her BEFORE choosing to, then there is no point in anyone, including her, making any argument to change anyone.
Within the paradigm of pre-ordained choice, no free will and the illusion of consciousness it suggests that there is no point in anything at all – that our body’s will do whatever they do and everyone else will do what they do and then consciousness will follow with an illusion of choosing what to do. And yet the contrast is right before us: I’ve never extended my hand and tried to move it when I felt like it. Yet everyone in her room was doing that. People who would not do it if her consciousness had not decided to devote her life to being a skeptic, and my consciousness had not been interested in what she had to say and understanding her thoughts enough to go along with her exercise. If one can scientifically show that every time she is around giving this lecture people will start extending their hands and waggling them around relative to the compare group, then it would seem to be that she influences other people to choose something different through language. I.e. that her impulses to talk about the experiment (conscious thought) influences others to do the experiment (conscious thought). The only other alternative is that skeptics and non-skeptics of consciousness are both pre-ordained, which means that lecturing to teach or change people is as meaningless as eating wood.
I prefer Plato: That Beauty Truth and Goodness are more fun than anything else, in the long run. That life, illusion or otherwise, is richer when we direct our attention towards those goals and on these areas. So why not. If it is an illusion, why not create a more beautiful illusion, with more truth and goodness than not.