Philosophy

Sorry, but this video is just painful to listen to, as it is just a series of claims where none of them are explained in any detail what is actually meant.

• "We've moved now into fully materialist thinking where everything is dead there is no Divine Beyond, and so Consciousness is the problem that needs to be solved. But the problem with that is there's nothing in well that is the problem is that there's nothing in matter that would make you think that it could be conscious"
• "...at one point that, even though everything in an organism is completely dependent on seemingly not living or non-conscious physical processes, he says that it could be that all these physical processes physics itself is there for life so that's almost theological or at least somewhat mystical and that still separates life from matter in a certain way."
• " I wonder if conscious experience is actually to be found in the wave function or whatever the wave function represents for us because there's no way for a thought to be just like a collection of electrons and and protons constructed together like Lego blocks."
• "I'm not convinced that any software can be conscious on the kind of computing hardware that we have, and I think if we want to make sentient robots we're going to need a different kind of hardware, and it could be...smart materials"

All of these kinds of phrases are just presented without much elaboration. If you are going to do a whole video, you might as well actually elaborate on what you're talking about. The whole video is largely just presenting a series of conclusions without putting much effort to explaining.

The closest thing the guy in the video gets to explaining anything is trying to justify it through "smart materials," but his own explanation contradicts himself as he does not define these "smart materials" in terms of a new chemical structure or a new atomic number, but instead describes them in terms of their behavior, stating that they are "materials that participate in their own generation...to be able to construct themselves."

However, if you're defining "smart materials" purely in terms of their function, their ability to construct themselves, then there is no reason in principle that machines made of iron and silicon could not construct themselves, albeit engineering self-reproducing robots is hard, but no reason to think it would literally require a new substance to achieve.

He never even explains anything about what is meant by "consciousness" so I have no idea what he is getting at with any of those other phrases, but he suggests in one of those quotes that this "consciousness" could be achieved with "smart materials," and thus he seems to define consciousness in terms of a behavior which I see no reason we could not replicate in principle, contradicting again the previous statements that this is somehow a big challenge for "materialists."