The Primacy of Consciousness

I watched the entire thing, with an open mind.

However, he’s conflating so many topics via tenuous links that he’s entirely given up rationality by the end of it.

I looked him up: http://www.peterrussell.com/index2.php

A New Ager, talking to a New Age audience. (It’s not an ad hominem because who he is is highly relevant to his assertions, being that he comes from a New Age perspective and thus is likely to employ pseudo-scientific means)
He conflates Berkeley’s subjective idealism with naive realism with social constructionism with information theory with … you name it, he throws it in.
He’s shoe-horning his pre-existing notions of spirituality onto a highly dubious pseudo-scientific framework in the hopes of convincing people that his introspective intuitions have scientific merit.

They don’t.

Several tacks:

1. Consciousness is everywhere. Panpsychism, essentially. Evidence?

He cites introspection and mystical experience as evidence. Scientists know that self-reports are highly unreliable, and Susan Blackmore goes into just how much of what is often claimed as mystical experience or revelation is really self-delusion or wishful thinking compounded by altered states of consciousness (e.g., sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucinations often confused as alien abduction), http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Chapters/Disbelief.htm

2. So he attempts a physical description of how the immanence of consciousness may be possible by describing the subjective nature of physical phenomena, such as special relativity and energy eigenstates, but makes the tenuous and dubious leap (a “quantum leap”? :) to suggesting that matter doesn’t exist and is only in the mind…
therefore, if matter doesn’t exist, it all must necessarily be consciousness.

I really did try, honestly, to appreciate their point of view, to see if it had any validity, but as Blackmore herself discovered, the more inspection you put it through, the less water it holds.

Wishful thinking.

@nagarjunary
I enjoyed it, although i can certainly appreciate the new age references..he qualified his presentation by stating that they were just his thoughts and had not undergone any rigorous scientific criticism…in fact it seems as though these were his own personal feelings and nothing more, as such it does not seem as though it does much good putting him under the microscope any more than he would expect from one of the attendees at said conference, that being said…data is data and i was entertained enough to give it a decent rating

qualium over quantum 4/5*

I agree that consciousness in the only thing we can truly trust. The fact that we are experiencing something. He later says that he knows you are conscious. How, if I only know I am conscious can I than state that there is consciousness “out there”? I like what he has to say after he makes this assumption, but his entire lecture is based on only the base assumptions he can truly trust- which is only that he is experiencing. It does not quite click. Although I did take a lot from this lecture on developing my own ideas of consciousness and reality and the brain. Its worth watching none the less.

If consciousness creates the building blocks of reality…hmmm. Wouldn’t it then be safe to say we may never find the edge of our universe, or the smallest particles/strings in the quantum world?… since everywhere we look, everywhere that consciousness explores (with the expectation that something will be there), supports the quantum theory that it is actually the act of observing that creates something ‘THERE’ for us to see. Like the Mandelbrot Set!……Infinity!