Nir Lahav: What If Consciousness Follows the Rules of Relativity?
episodePreviously titled “This Physicist Has A "Relativistic Theory of Consciousness"” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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Why do most people think consciousness is generated by the brain?
The default assumption for most people in the West is that the brain generates consciousness. So something brainy, neurological happens, neurons are firing, and then consciousness pops out like steam from a kettle. Now you think this is not just wrong, you think it's confused. Before we get technical, what's the short version of what you think's actually happening?
What actually is ha happening here is um a physical process and not only computational process. Uh because of relativity, that from the outside we can measure neural patterns and from the inside we measure a new physical entity which we call consciousness. So this is like a one line, you know, of of of the theory.
Okay, explain how most people, most of your colleagues who aren't educated in these matters, think of consciousness.
I guess so if we take uh people from the street and ask them what do you think about consciousness? Most most of the people, including me when I was a child, would think that. Consciousness is separate than matter. It's something different, you know, very dualistic way of thinking. I guess maybe because of uh the influence of religion, you know we tend to think of a soul or something like that, right? But then We saw that actually there is Not only great correlation between consciousness and the brain, but also causation. If I uh if we uh stimulus An area in the vision cortex, for example, we can create a conscious experience of seeing. Even though there's s nothing there, you know, just because of the electricity of the stimulus uh that we that we gave.
And in a different area, if we will stimulate. the person will say that they feel, um, for example, humor or that there is something that is funny all of a sudden. Right? So we have this causality between the activity of the brain And consciousness.
How does Nir Lahav explain consciousness as a physical process using relativity?
So we would think that consciousness is just um something that emerges from our brain. And if we know enough neuroscience and we understand enough the computations of the brain, then we will explain the emergence of consciousness. But it's not the case. the I'm i I mean i h in in philosophy s for millennia and and and la in recent years from let's say the seventies, we know that there is a very hard problem here. There is a mystery, a big mystery about consciousness. I think that most of scientists and neuroscientists don't appreciate enough. this hard problem. But it's there. There is a really big mystery here. We cannot just say that, you know, consciousness is computations of the brain.
Look, for those who are just tuning in, we'll go over your relativistic theory of consciousness, which has over a hundred thousand downloads, by the way. And it will be explained extremely simply to the audience with intuitive analogies. I'll even explain your own theory back to you to ensure that I understand it, and then I'll tell you what troubles me about it. Sure. Excellent. Anyhow, you said something super interesting, if I heard you correctly. It's that it's not just a computational process, it's a physical process. So many viewers of this channel may have heard of the church term. Turing thesis, maybe they've even heard of the physical church Turing thesis. Are you not accepting the physical church Turing thesis?
Do you think there's more to physical processes to physics than what's computational?
So I think that there are two questions, separate questions here. One is about the computations and the uh Turing uh church church Turing hypothesis is about the ability that if if something can be um computed then uh um we can build a computer or you know like a a Turing machine that will compute it. With that, you know, it's it's I have no problem, let's say But it okay, but it doesn't mean what th that our brain only create um computations. I mean, of course our brain creates lots of computations. Uh this is what a cognitive system does, you know, it gets information from the outside world, manipulate it with computations and create you know, representations and and in the end of the day creates uh outputs.
What I'm trying to say that it's not enough in order to create consciousness.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do most people think consciousness is generated by the brain?
0:00–2:25
2
How does Nir Lahav explain consciousness as a physical process using relativity?
2:25–13:23
3
What is the ‘explanatory gap’ and why is the hard problem of consciousness still unsolved?
13:23–16:37
4
How does the principle of relativity and relationalism help model conscious experience?
16:37–1:32:21
5
How does the principle of relativity lead to an infinite set of “bubbles” of reality?
1:32:21–1:48:16
6
What is a cognitive frame of reference and how does affective‑valence become a physical property?
1:48:16–2:04:25
7
How does the simulation‑inside‑the‑brain generate the first phenomenological property – the “what‑it‑like” experience?
2:04:25–2:32:47
8
Why does a relativistic view rule out philosophical zombies in the zombie‑argument?
2:32:47–3:00:34
Speakers
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