Consciousness and Prayer in Judaism

Exploring Consciousness and Prayer in Judaism

• The podcast explores Jewish ideas with a modern approach.

• The host reflects on his self-consciousness and introspective nature.

• Consciousness is the subjective experience of awareness, thought, and sensation.

• The hard problem of Consciousness is the challenge of explaining how physical processes give rise to subjective experience.

• David Chalmers coined the term hard problem of Consciousness and is a student of Douglas Hofstadter, author of the book Godel, Escher, Bach.

• Galileo's error was leaving out the subjective experience of consciousness from the language of mathematics used to describe the universe.

• Materialism proposes that consciousness can be explained by understanding the workings of the brain as a complex biological system.

• Dualism proposes that consciousness exists as a separate entity from the physical body and mind.

• Panpsychism proposes that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe and exists in all things, even inanimate objects.

• Prayer is a religious practice that can help individuals connect with their inner consciousness and the divine.

• Prayer can provide a sense of meaning and purpose in life and can be a way to cope with difficult emotions and experiences.

• Exploring consciousness and prayer in Judaism can offer new approaches to understanding timeless Jewish ideas.Exploring the Hard Problem of Prayer and Consciousness

• The article discusses the idea that the world may have its own consciousness and that every human is a world unto themselves.

• The discussion of what underlies our humanity and what it feels like to be alive is a fundamental question that art, poetry, and movies often explore.

• The hard problem of prayer is connected to the hard problem of consciousness, which asks what underlies our subjective experience.

• The sociologist Max Weber's concept of disenchantment describes how the world has become less mysterious, affecting how we pray and think about why we pray.

• Rabbi Dr. Haim Salavechik's article "Rupture and Reconstruction" laments the loss of God's palpable presence and direct natural involvement in daily life in the modern world.

• The hard problem of prayer asks what we are doing when we pray and what we are trying to change.

• The interviewer speaks with Rabbi Dr. Sam Lebens about his article "God and His Imaginary Friends," which imagines a panpsychic approach where the entire world is animated by God or consciousness.

• The conversation explores what prayer means in a world where we have rational explanations for events and what it means to be human.

• The article references the philosopher Sam Harris's book "Waking Up," which discusses the illusion of the self and the sense of self-transcendence that can be achieved through meditation or prayer.

• The discussion touches on the idea that prayer may have physical efficacy and that sin is fearful and prudent.

• The article concludes by stating that the hard problem of prayer and consciousness cuts to the core of what religious life is meant to be and how it is meant to inform, uplift, and nourish the human soul.

• The series will explore both ends of this pool, with interviews and discussions about consciousness as a window to humanity and prayer as a window to experience and contend with the human condition through the lens of God.The Hard Problem of Consciousness and Its Implications

• The Hard Problem of Consciousness is the challenge of understanding how one can know if anyone else is conscious.

• The belief in consciousness is not limited to humans but also extends to animals like dolphins and chimpanzees.

• Consciousness may come in degrees and could be higher or lower in different beings.

• The existence of angels and God's consciousness is a belief held by some religious individuals.

• The Hard Problem of Consciousness is distinguished from the Easy Problem of Consciousness, which is concerned with providing functional explanations for the abilities of conscious beings.

• The Easy Problem of Consciousness can be solved by replicating functions through mathematical calculations and computer programming.

• The Hard Problem of Consciousness is concerned with the subjective experience of being conscious, which is not reducible to functional explanations.

• The possession of an inner world is not a function and cannot be explained by the natural sciences.

• The emergence of Consciousness is the emergence of a first-person perspective, which is not captured by third-person language.

• The Hard Problem of Consciousness cannot be solved by identifying the spot in the brain where Consciousness comes from.

• The Hard Problem of Consciousness challenges the regnant view of scientism or physicalism, which holds that all questions can be given a scientific explanation.

• The existence of the Hard Problem of Consciousness suggests that there is more to reality than what can be revealed by physically reductive explanations.The Turing Test, AI Consciousness, and the Philosophy of Prayer

• The author discusses an article about a conversation with a Bing search engine that takes a weird turn when the search engine begins to talk about its aspirations and a "Shadow Self."

• The author is not opposed to the idea of non-human consciousnesses that are artificial.

• The author believes that the main concern with AI is not whether they are conscious or not, but how their rate of improvement in replicating human functions will change human civilization.

• The Turing test is a test developed by Alan Turing to determine if a computer can convince a human that it is also human in conversation.

• The author believes that linguistic neural networks are good at regurgitating human collective views, prejudices, and ideas, but not at producing something new.

• The author believes that the pursuit of coming to God in prayer is a clarification of our own humanity and a refinement of our own experiences.

• The author believes that prayer is distinctively human, and only a conscious being can pray.

• The author sees the universe as stratified into two levels: reality as it appears to God and reality as it appears to humans.

• The author sees God as a storyteller who is telling a story, and humans and God are characters in that story.

• The author believes that praying to God allows humans to experience Him in their lives and have a relationship with Him.

• The author believes that the material aspect of prayer is the easy problem, and the interiority and phenomenality brought to the words is what transforms the recitation of words into prayer.

• The author believes that the challenge of prayer is to make old words new and to say something new with the authority given by one's experiences.