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David Chalmers: The Hard Problem of Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #69


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The following is a conversation with David Chalmers.
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He's a philosopher and cognitive scientist
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specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind,
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philosophy of language, and consciousness.
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He's perhaps best known for formulating
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the hard problem of consciousness,
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which could be stated as why does the feeling
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which accompanies awareness of sensory information
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exist at all?
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Consciousness is almost entirely a mystery.
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Many people who worry about AI safety and ethics
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believe that, in some form, consciousness can
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and should be engineered into AI systems of the future.
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So while there's much mystery, disagreement,
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discoveries yet to be made about consciousness,
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these conversations, while fundamentally philosophical
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in nature, may nevertheless be very important
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for engineers of modern AI systems to engage in.
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This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
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And now, here's my conversation with David Chalmers.
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Do you think we're living in a simulation?
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I don't rule it out.
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There's probably gonna be a lot of simulations
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in the history of the cosmos.
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If the simulation is designed well enough,
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it'll be indistinguishable from a non simulated reality.
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And although we could keep searching for evidence
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that we're not in a simulation,
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any of that evidence in principle could be simulated.
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So I think it's a possibility.
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But do you think the thought experiment is interesting
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or useful to calibrate how we think
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about the nature of reality?
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Yeah, I definitely think it's interesting and useful.
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In fact, I'm actually writing a book about this right now,
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all about the simulation idea,
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using it to shed light
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on a whole bunch of philosophical questions.
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So the big one is how do we know anything
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about the external world?
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Descartes said, maybe you're being fooled by an evil demon
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who's stimulating your brain into thinking,
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all this stuff is real when in fact, it's all made up.
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Well, the modern version of that is,
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how do you know you're not in a simulation?
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Then the thought is, if you're in a simulation,
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none of this is real.
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So that's teaching you something about knowledge.
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How do you know about the external world?
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I think there's also really interesting questions
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about the nature of reality right here.
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If we are in a simulation, is all this real?
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Is there really a table here?
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Is it really a microphone?
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Do I really have a body?
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The standard view would be, no, we don't.
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None of this would be real.
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My view is actually that's wrong.
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And even if we are in a simulation, all of this is real.
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That's why I called this reality 2.0.
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New version of reality, different version of reality,
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still reality.
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So what's the difference between quote unquote,
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real world and the world that we perceive?
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So we interact with the world by perceiving it.
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It only really exists through the window
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of our perception system and in our mind.
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So what's the difference between something
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that's quote unquote real, that exists perhaps
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without us being there, and the world as you perceive it?
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Well the world as we perceive it is a very simplified
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and distorted version of what's going on underneath.
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We already know that from just thinking about science.
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You don't see too many obviously quantum mechanical effects
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in what we perceive, but we still know quantum mechanics
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is going on under all things.
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So I like to think the world we perceive
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is this very kind of simplified picture of colors
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and shapes existing in space and so on.
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We know there's a, that's what the philosopher
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Wilfred Sellers called the manifest image.
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The world as it seems to us, we already know
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underneath all that is a very different scientific image
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with atoms or quantum wave functions or super strings
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or whatever the latest thing is.
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And that's the ultimate scientific reality.
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So I think of the simulation idea as basically
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another hypothesis about what the ultimate
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say quasi scientific or metaphysical reality
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is going on underneath the world of the manifest image.
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The world of the manifest image is this very simple thing
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that we interact with that's neutral
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on the underlying stuff of reality.
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Science can help tell us about that.
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Maybe philosophy can help tell us about that too.
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And if we eventually take the red pill
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and find out we're in a simulation,
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my view is that's just another view
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about what reality is made of.
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The philosopher Immanuel Kant said,
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what is the nature of the thing in itself?
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I've got a glass here and it's got all these,
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it appears to me a certain way, a certain shape,
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it's liquid, it's clear.
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And he said, what is the nature of the thing
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in itself?
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Well, I think of the simulation idea,
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it's a hypothesis about the nature of the thing in itself.
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It turns out if we're in a simulation,
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the thing in itself nature of this glass,
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it's okay, it's actually a bunch of data structures
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running on a computer in the next universe up.
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Yeah, that's what people tend to do
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when they think about simulation.
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They think about our modern computers
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and somehow trivially crudely just scaled up in some sense.
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But do you think the simulation,
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I mean, in order to actually simulate
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something as complicated as our universe
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that's made up of molecules and atoms
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and particles and quarks and maybe even strings,
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all of that would require something
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just infinitely many orders of magnitude more
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of scale and complexity.
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Do you think we're even able to even like conceptualize
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what it would take to simulate our universe?
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Or does it just slip into this idea
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that you basically have to build a universe,
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something so big to simulate it?
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Does it get this into this fuzzy area
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that's not useful at all?
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Yeah, well, I mean, our universe
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is obviously incredibly complicated.
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And for us within our universe to build a simulation
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of a universe as complicated as ours
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is gonna have obvious problems here.
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If the universe is finite,
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there's just no way that's gonna work.
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Maybe there's some cute way to make it work
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if the universe is infinite,
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maybe an infinite universe could somehow simulate
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a copy of itself, but that's gonna be hard.
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Nonetheless, just that we are in a simulation,
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I think there's no particular reason
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why we have to think the simulating universe
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has to be anything like ours.
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You've said before that it might be,
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so you could think of it in turtles all the way down.
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You could think of the simulating universe
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different than ours, but we ourselves
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could also create another simulating universe.
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So you said that there could be these
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kind of levels of universes.
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And you've also mentioned this hilarious idea,
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maybe tongue in cheek, maybe not,
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that there may be simulations within simulations,
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arbitrarily stacked levels,
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and that there may be, that we may be in level 42.
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Oh yeah.
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Along those stacks, referencing Hitchhiker's Guide
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to the Universe.
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If we're indeed in a simulation within a simulation
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at level 42, what do you think level zero looks like?
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The originating universe.
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I would expect that level zero is truly enormous.
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I mean, not just, if it's finite,
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at some extraordinarily large finite capacity,
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much more likely it's infinite.
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Maybe it's got some very high cardinality
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that enables it to support just any number of simulations.
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So high degree of infinity at level zero,
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slightly smaller degree of infinity at level one.
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So by the time you get down to us at level 42,
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maybe there's plenty of room for lots of simulations
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of finite capacity.
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If the top universe is only a small finite capacity,
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then obviously that's gonna put very, very serious limits
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on how many simulations you're gonna be able to get running.
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So I think we can certainly confidently say
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that if we're at level 42,
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then the top level's pretty damn big.
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So it gets more and more constrained
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as we get down levels, more and more simplified
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and constrained and limited in resources.
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Yeah, we still have plenty of capacity here.
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What was it Feynman said?
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He said there's plenty of room at the bottom.
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We're still a number of levels above the degree
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where there's room for fundamental computing,
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physical computing capacity,
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quantum computing capacity at the bottom level.
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So we've got plenty of room to play with
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and we probably have plenty of room
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for simulations of pretty sophisticated universes,
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perhaps none as complicated as our universe,
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unless our universe is infinite,
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but still at the very least
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for pretty serious finite universes,
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but maybe universes somewhat simpler than ours,
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unless of course we're prepared to take certain shortcuts
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in the simulation,
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which might then increase the capacity significantly.
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Do you think the human mind, us people,
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in terms of the complexity of simulation
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is at the height of what the simulation
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might be able to achieve?
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Like if you look at incredible entities
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that could be created in this universe of ours,
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do you have an intuition about
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how incredible human beings are on that scale?
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I think we're pretty impressive,
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but we're not that impressive.
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Are we above average?
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I mean, I think human beings are at a certain point
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in the scale of intelligence,
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which made many things possible.
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You get through evolution, through single cell organisms,
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through fish and mammals and primates,
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and something happens.
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Once you get to human beings,
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we've just reached that level
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where we get to develop language,
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we get to develop certain kinds of culture,
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and we get to develop certain kinds of collective thinking
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that has enabled all this amazing stuff to happen,
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science and literature and engineering
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and culture and so on.
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So we had just at the beginning of that
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on the evolutionary threshold,
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it's kind of like we just got there,
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who knows, a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago.
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So we're probably just at the very beginning
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for what's possible there.
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So I'm inclined to think among the scale
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of intelligent beings,
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we're somewhere very near the bottom.
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I would expect that, for example,
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if we're in a simulation,
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then the simulators who created us
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have got the capacity to be far more sophisticated.
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If we're at level 42,
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who knows what the ones at level zero are like.
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It's also possible that this is the epitome
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of what is possible to achieve.
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So we as human beings see ourselves maybe as flawed,
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see all the constraints, all the limitations,
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but maybe that's the magical, the beautiful thing.
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Maybe those limitations are the essential elements
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for an interesting sort of that edge of chaos,
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that interesting existence,
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that if you make us much more intelligent,
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if you make us much more powerful
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in any kind of dimension of performance,
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maybe you lose something fundamental
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that makes life worth living.
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So you kind of have this optimistic view
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that we're this little baby,
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that then there's so much growth and potential,
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but this could also be it.
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This is the most amazing thing is us.
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Maybe what you're saying is consistent
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with what I'm saying.
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I mean, we could still have levels of intelligence
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far beyond us,
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but maybe those levels of intelligence on your view
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would be kind of boring.
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And we kind of get so good at everything
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that life suddenly becomes uni dimensional.
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So we're just inhabiting this one spot
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of like maximal romanticism in the history of evolution.
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You get to humans and it's like, yeah,
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and then years to come, our super intelligent descendants
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are gonna look back at us and say,
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those were the days when they just hit
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the point of inflection and life was interesting.
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I am an optimist.
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So I'd like to think that if there is super intelligent
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somewhere in the future,
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they'll figure out how to make life super interesting
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and super romantic.
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Well, you know what they're gonna do.
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So what they're gonna do is they realize
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how boring life is when you're super intelligent.
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So they create a new level of assimilation
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and sort of live through the things they've created
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by watching them stumble about
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in their flawed ways.
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So maybe that's, so you create a new level of assimilation
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every time you get really bored with how smart and.
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This would be kind of sad though,
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because if we showed the peak of their existence
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would be like watching simulations for entertainment.
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Not like saying the peak of our existence now is Netflix.
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No, it's all right.
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A flip side of that could be the peak of our existence
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for many people having children and watching them grow.
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That becomes very meaningful.
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Okay, you create a simulation that's like creating a family.
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Creating like, well, any kind of creation
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is kind of a powerful act.
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Do you think it's easier to simulate the mind
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or the universe?
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So I've heard several people, including Nick Bostrom,
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think about ideas of maybe you don't need
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to simulate the universe,
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you can just simulate the human mind.
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Or in general, just the distinction
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between simulating the entirety of it,
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the entirety of the physical world,
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or just simulating the mind.
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Which one do you see as more challenging?
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Well, I think in some sense, the answer is obvious.
link |
00:15:12.380
It has to be simpler to simulate the mind
link |
00:15:15.060
than to simulate the universe,
link |
00:15:16.500
because the mind is part of the universe.
link |
00:15:18.500
And in order to fully simulate the universe,
link |
00:15:20.540
you're gonna have to simulate the mind.
link |
00:15:22.620
So unless we're talking about partial simulations.
link |
00:15:25.320
And I guess the question is which comes first?
link |
00:15:27.580
Does the mind come before the universe
link |
00:15:29.800
or does the universe come before the mind?
link |
00:15:32.560
So the mind could just be an emergent phenomena
link |
00:15:36.620
in this universe.
link |
00:15:37.960
So simulation is an interesting thing
link |
00:15:42.020
that it's not like creating a simulation perhaps
link |
00:15:47.380
requires you to program every single thing
link |
00:15:50.380
that happens in it.
link |
00:15:51.780
It's just defining a set of initial conditions
link |
00:15:54.220
and rules based on which it behaves.
link |
00:15:59.600
Simulating the mind requires you
link |
00:16:01.940
to have a little bit more,
link |
00:16:05.160
we're now in a little bit of a crazy land,
link |
00:16:07.300
but it requires you to understand
link |
00:16:10.260
the fundamentals of cognition,
link |
00:16:11.840
perhaps of consciousness,
link |
00:16:13.660
of perception of everything like that,
link |
00:16:16.640
that's not created through some kind of emergence
link |
00:16:23.340
from basic physics laws,
link |
00:16:25.880
but more requires you to actually understand
link |
00:16:27.940
the fundamentals of the mind.
link |
00:16:29.820
How about if we said to simulate the brain?
link |
00:16:31.660
The brain.
link |
00:16:32.500
Rather than the mind.
link |
00:16:33.940
So the brain is just a big physical system.
link |
00:16:36.060
The universe is a giant physical system.
link |
00:16:38.620
To simulate the universe at the very least,
link |
00:16:40.100
you're gonna have to simulate the brains
link |
00:16:42.640
as well as all the other physical systems within it.
link |
00:16:46.140
And it's not obvious that the problems are any worse
link |
00:16:50.920
for the brain than for,
link |
00:16:53.580
it's a particularly complex physical system.
link |
00:16:56.040
But if we can simulate arbitrary physical systems,
link |
00:16:58.600
we can simulate brains.
link |
00:16:59.880
There is this further question of whether,
link |
00:17:02.100
when you simulate a brain,
link |
00:17:03.980
will that bring along all the features of the mind with it?
link |
00:17:07.340
Like will you get consciousness?
link |
00:17:08.880
Will you get thinking?
link |
00:17:09.980
Will you get free will?
link |
00:17:11.600
And so on.
link |
00:17:12.540
And that's something philosophers have argued over
link |
00:17:16.200
for years.
link |
00:17:17.060
My own view is if you simulate the brain well enough,
link |
00:17:20.060
that will also simulate the mind.
link |
00:17:22.620
But yeah, there's plenty of people who would say no.
link |
00:17:24.860
You'd merely get like a zombie system,
link |
00:17:27.140
a simulation of a brain without any true consciousness.
link |
00:17:31.300
But for you, you put together a brain,
link |
00:17:33.420
the consciousness comes with it, arise.
link |
00:17:36.320
Yeah, I don't think it's obvious.
link |
00:17:38.640
That's your intuition.
link |
00:17:39.660
My view is roughly that yeah,
link |
00:17:41.320
what is responsible for consciousness,
link |
00:17:43.100
it's in the patterns of information processing and so on
link |
00:17:46.960
rather than say the biology that it's made of.
link |
00:17:50.460
There's certainly plenty of people out there
link |
00:17:51.780
who think consciousness has to be say biological.
link |
00:17:54.520
So if you merely replicate the patterns of information
link |
00:17:57.300
processing in a nonbiological substrate,
link |
00:17:59.680
you'll miss what's crucial for consciousness.
link |
00:18:02.440
I mean, I just don't think there's any particular reason
link |
00:18:04.320
to think that biology is special here.
link |
00:18:07.380
You can imagine substituting the biology
link |
00:18:09.620
for nonbiological systems, say silicon circuits
link |
00:18:13.700
that play the same role.
link |
00:18:15.120
The behavior will continue to be the same.
link |
00:18:17.620
And I think just thinking about what is the true,
link |
00:18:21.300
when I think about the connection,
link |
00:18:22.300
the isomorphisms between consciousness and the brain,
link |
00:18:25.540
the deepest connections to me seem to connect consciousness
link |
00:18:28.300
to patterns of information processing,
link |
00:18:30.300
not to specific biology.
link |
00:18:32.380
So I at least adopted as my working hypothesis
link |
00:18:35.180
that basically it's the computation and the information
link |
00:18:38.180
that matters for consciousness.
link |
00:18:39.580
Same time, we don't understand consciousness,
link |
00:18:41.820
so all this could be wrong.
link |
00:18:43.700
So the computation, the flow, the processing,
link |
00:18:48.180
manipulation of information,
link |
00:18:49.840
the process is where the consciousness,
link |
00:18:54.440
the software is where the consciousness comes from,
link |
00:18:56.480
not the hardware.
link |
00:18:57.860
Roughly the software, yeah.
link |
00:18:59.200
The patterns of information processing at least
link |
00:19:01.800
in the hardware, which we could view as software.
link |
00:19:05.720
It may not be something you can just like program
link |
00:19:07.360
and load and erase and so on in the way we can
link |
00:19:11.360
with ordinary software, but it's something at the level
link |
00:19:14.000
of information processing rather than at the level
link |
00:19:16.240
of implementation.
link |
00:19:17.960
So on that, what do you think of the experience of self,
link |
00:19:22.480
just the experience of the world in a virtual world,
link |
00:19:26.040
in virtual reality?
link |
00:19:27.920
Is it possible that we can create sort of
link |
00:19:33.480
offsprings of our consciousness by existing
link |
00:19:36.760
in a virtual world long enough?
link |
00:19:38.840
So yeah, can we be conscious in the same kind
link |
00:19:44.520
of deep way that we are in this real world
link |
00:19:47.640
by hanging out in a virtual world?
link |
00:19:51.120
Yeah, well, the kind of virtual worlds we have now
link |
00:19:54.160
are interesting but limited in certain ways.
link |
00:19:58.040
In particular, they rely on us having a brain and so on,
link |
00:20:01.680
which is outside the virtual world.
link |
00:20:03.560
Maybe I'll strap on my VR headset or just hang out
link |
00:20:07.520
in a virtual world on a screen, but my brain
link |
00:20:12.920
and then my physical environment might be simulated
link |
00:20:16.560
if I'm in a virtual world, but right now,
link |
00:20:18.560
there's no attempt to simulate my brain.
link |
00:20:21.320
There might be some non player characters
link |
00:20:24.120
in these virtual worlds that have simulated
link |
00:20:27.440
cognitive systems of certain kinds
link |
00:20:29.040
that dictate their behavior, but mostly,
link |
00:20:31.280
they're pretty simple right now.
link |
00:20:33.080
I mean, some people are trying to combine,
link |
00:20:34.640
put a bit of AI in their non player characters
link |
00:20:36.900
to make them smarter, but for now,
link |
00:20:41.340
inside virtual world, the actual thinking
link |
00:20:43.720
is interestingly distinct from the physics
link |
00:20:46.000
of those virtual worlds.
link |
00:20:47.180
In a way, actually, I like to think this is kind of
link |
00:20:48.920
reminiscent of the way that Descartes
link |
00:20:50.480
thought our physical world was.
link |
00:20:52.280
There's physics, and there's the mind,
link |
00:20:54.400
and they're separate.
link |
00:20:55.240
Now we think the mind is somehow connected
link |
00:20:58.800
to physics pretty deeply, but in these virtual worlds,
link |
00:21:01.100
there's a physics of a virtual world,
link |
00:21:03.000
and then there's this brain which is totally
link |
00:21:04.840
outside the virtual world that controls it
link |
00:21:06.880
and interacts it when anyone exercises agency
link |
00:21:10.520
in a video game, that's actually somebody
link |
00:21:12.360
outside the virtual world moving a controller,
link |
00:21:14.920
controlling the interaction of things
link |
00:21:16.680
inside the virtual world.
link |
00:21:18.240
So right now, in virtual worlds,
link |
00:21:20.460
the mind is somehow outside the world,
link |
00:21:22.360
but you could imagine in the future,
link |
00:21:25.040
once we have developed serious AI,
link |
00:21:29.080
artificial general intelligence, and so on,
link |
00:21:31.560
then we could come to virtual worlds
link |
00:21:34.440
which have enough sophistication,
link |
00:21:35.720
you could actually simulate a brain
link |
00:21:38.040
or have a genuine AGI, which would then presumably
link |
00:21:42.920
be able to act in equally sophisticated ways,
link |
00:21:45.880
maybe even more sophisticated ways,
link |
00:21:47.880
inside the virtual world to how it might
link |
00:21:50.520
in the physical world, and then the question's
link |
00:21:52.400
gonna come along, that would be kind of a VR,
link |
00:21:56.040
virtual world internal intelligence,
link |
00:21:59.520
and then the question is could they have consciousness,
link |
00:22:01.720
experience, intelligence, free will,
link |
00:22:04.720
all the things that we have, and again,
link |
00:22:06.520
my view is I don't see why not.
link |
00:22:08.840
To linger on it a little bit, I find virtual reality really
link |
00:22:13.160
incredibly powerful, just even the crude virtual reality
link |
00:22:15.880
we have now of perhaps there's psychological effects
link |
00:22:21.800
that make some people more amenable
link |
00:22:23.960
to virtual worlds than others, but I find myself
link |
00:22:26.260
wanting to stay in virtual worlds for the most part.
link |
00:22:28.360
You do?
link |
00:22:29.200
Yes.
link |
00:22:30.020
With a headset or on a desktop?
link |
00:22:32.080
No, with a headset.
link |
00:22:33.020
Really interesting, because I am totally addicted
link |
00:22:35.640
to using the internet and things on a desktop,
link |
00:22:40.680
but when it comes to VR, with a headset,
link |
00:22:43.040
I don't typically use it for more than 10 or 20 minutes.
link |
00:22:46.140
There's something just slightly aversive about it, I find,
link |
00:22:48.760
so I don't, right now, even though I have Oculus Rift
link |
00:22:52.120
and Oculus Quest and HTC Vive and Samsung, this and that.
link |
00:22:55.800
You just don't wanna stay in that world for long.
link |
00:22:57.360
Not for extended periods.
link |
00:22:58.760
You actually find yourself hanging out in that.
link |
00:23:01.000
Something about, it's both a combination
link |
00:23:03.660
of just imagination and considering the possibilities
link |
00:23:08.000
of where this goes in the future.
link |
00:23:10.640
It feels like I want to almost prepare my brain for it.
link |
00:23:17.000
I wanna explore sort of Disneyland
link |
00:23:19.680
when it's first being built in the early days,
link |
00:23:23.700
and it feels like I'm walking around
link |
00:23:27.400
almost imagining the possibilities,
link |
00:23:31.420
and something through that process allows my mind
link |
00:23:33.840
to really enter into that world,
link |
00:23:36.020
but you say that the brain is external to that virtual world.
link |
00:23:41.940
It is, strictly speaking, true, but...
link |
00:23:46.600
If you're in VR and you do brain surgery on an avatar,
link |
00:23:50.600
and you're gonna open up that skull,
link |
00:23:51.800
what are you gonna find?
link |
00:23:53.000
Sorry, nothing there.
link |
00:23:53.840
Nothing.
link |
00:23:54.680
The brain is elsewhere.
link |
00:23:55.880
You don't think it's possible to kind of separate them,
link |
00:23:59.520
and I don't mean in a sense like Descartes,
link |
00:24:02.960
like a hard separation, but basically,
link |
00:24:06.720
do you think it's possible with the brain outside
link |
00:24:09.600
of the virtual rhythm, when you're wearing a headset,
link |
00:24:14.920
create a new consciousness for prolonged periods of time?
link |
00:24:19.840
Really feel, like really, like forget
link |
00:24:24.660
that your brain is outside.
link |
00:24:26.280
So this is, okay, this is gonna be the case
link |
00:24:27.800
where the brain is still outside.
link |
00:24:29.200
It's still outside.
link |
00:24:30.040
But could living in the VR, I mean,
link |
00:24:32.120
we already find this, right, with video games.
link |
00:24:35.120
Exactly.
link |
00:24:35.960
They're completely immersive, and you get taken up
link |
00:24:39.200
by living in those worlds,
link |
00:24:40.640
and it becomes your reality for a while.
link |
00:24:43.200
So they're not completely immersive,
link |
00:24:44.760
they're just very immersive.
link |
00:24:46.040
Completely immersive.
link |
00:24:46.880
You don't forget the external world, no.
link |
00:24:48.800
Exactly, so that's what I'm asking.
link |
00:24:50.920
Do you think it's almost possible
link |
00:24:52.220
to really forget the external world?
link |
00:24:55.700
Really, really immerse yourself.
link |
00:24:58.440
To forget completely?
link |
00:24:59.840
Why would we forget?
link |
00:25:00.680
We got pretty good memories.
link |
00:25:02.200
Maybe you can stop paying attention to the external world,
link |
00:25:06.000
but this already happens a lot.
link |
00:25:07.540
I go to work, and maybe I'm not paying attention
link |
00:25:10.000
to my home life.
link |
00:25:11.080
I go to a movie, and I'm immersed in that.
link |
00:25:14.520
So that degree of immersion, absolutely.
link |
00:25:17.100
But we still have the capacity to remember it,
link |
00:25:19.640
to completely forget the external world.
link |
00:25:21.960
I'm thinking that would probably take some,
link |
00:25:23.920
I don't know, some pretty serious drugs or something
link |
00:25:25.760
to make your brain do that.
link |
00:25:27.600
Is that possible?
link |
00:25:28.960
So, I mean, I guess what I'm getting at
link |
00:25:31.040
is consciousness truly a property
link |
00:25:35.640
that's tied to the physical brain?
link |
00:25:41.040
Or can you create sort of different offspring,
link |
00:25:45.000
copies of consciousnesses based on the worlds
link |
00:25:47.600
that you enter?
link |
00:25:49.400
Well, the way we're doing it now,
link |
00:25:51.560
at least with a standard VR, there's just one brain.
link |
00:25:54.900
Interacts with the physical world.
link |
00:25:56.640
Plays a video game, puts on a video headset,
link |
00:25:59.360
interacts with this virtual world.
link |
00:26:01.720
And I think we'd typically say there's one consciousness here
link |
00:26:04.800
that nonetheless undergoes different environments,
link |
00:26:07.520
takes on different characters in different environments.
link |
00:26:11.880
This is already something that happens
link |
00:26:13.160
in the nonvirtual world.
link |
00:26:14.320
I might interact one way in my home life,
link |
00:26:17.480
my work life, my social life, and so on.
link |
00:26:21.200
So at the very least, that will happen
link |
00:26:23.960
in a virtual world very naturally.
link |
00:26:25.780
People sometimes adopt the character of avatars
link |
00:26:30.360
very different from themselves,
link |
00:26:32.400
maybe even a different gender, different race,
link |
00:26:34.800
different social background.
link |
00:26:37.000
So that much is certainly possible.
link |
00:26:38.800
I would see that as a single consciousness
link |
00:26:41.160
is taking on different personas.
link |
00:26:43.360
If you want literal splitting of consciousness
link |
00:26:46.280
into multiple copies,
link |
00:26:47.400
I think it's gonna take something more radical than that.
link |
00:26:50.640
Like maybe you can run different simulations of your brain
link |
00:26:54.360
in different realities
link |
00:26:56.080
and then expose them to different histories.
link |
00:26:57.880
And then you'd split yourself
link |
00:27:00.160
into 10 different simulated copies,
link |
00:27:01.900
which then undergo different environments
link |
00:27:04.120
and then ultimately do become 10
link |
00:27:05.680
very different consciousnesses.
link |
00:27:07.720
Maybe that could happen,
link |
00:27:08.600
but now we're not talking about something
link |
00:27:10.440
that's possible in the near term.
link |
00:27:12.240
We're gonna have to have brain simulations
link |
00:27:14.040
and AGI for that to happen.
link |
00:27:17.400
Got it.
link |
00:27:18.240
So before any of that happens,
link |
00:27:20.200
it's fundamentally you see it as a singular consciousness,
link |
00:27:23.760
even though it's experiencing different environments,
link |
00:27:26.400
virtual or not,
link |
00:27:27.780
it's still connected to same set of memories,
link |
00:27:30.480
same set of experiences and therefore,
link |
00:27:32.760
one sort of joint conscious system.
link |
00:27:38.240
Yeah, or at least no more multiple
link |
00:27:40.560
than the kind of multiple consciousness
link |
00:27:42.140
that we get from inhabiting different environments
link |
00:27:45.000
in a non virtual world.
link |
00:27:46.720
So you said as a child,
link |
00:27:48.760
you were a music color synesthete.
link |
00:27:53.440
So where songs had colors for you.
link |
00:27:56.440
So what songs had what colors?
link |
00:27:59.760
You know, this is funny.
link |
00:28:00.960
I didn't pay much attention to this at the time,
link |
00:28:04.040
but I'd listen to a piece of music
link |
00:28:05.340
and I'd get some kind of imagery
link |
00:28:07.560
of a kind of color.
link |
00:28:11.400
The weird thing is mostly they were kind of murky,
link |
00:28:16.120
dark greens and olive browns
link |
00:28:18.560
and the colors weren't all that interesting.
link |
00:28:21.600
I don't know what the reason is.
link |
00:28:22.520
I mean, my theory is that maybe it's like different chords
link |
00:28:25.280
and tones provided different colors
link |
00:28:27.720
and they all tended to get mixed together
link |
00:28:29.280
into these somewhat uninteresting browns and greens.
link |
00:28:33.200
But every now and then there'd be something
link |
00:28:35.480
that had a really pure color.
link |
00:28:37.360
So there's just a few that I remember.
link |
00:28:39.360
There was a Here, There and Everywhere by the Beatles
link |
00:28:42.440
was bright red and has this very distinctive tonality
link |
00:28:46.360
and it's called structure at the beginning.
link |
00:28:49.680
So that was bright red.
link |
00:28:50.880
There was this song by the Alan Parsons Project
link |
00:28:53.960
called Ammonia Avenue that was kind of a pure, a pure blue.
link |
00:28:59.720
Anyway, I've got no idea how this happened.
link |
00:29:02.080
I didn't even pay that much attention
link |
00:29:03.120
until it went away when I was about 20.
link |
00:29:05.400
This synesthesia often goes away.
link |
00:29:07.480
So is it purely just the perception of a particular color
link |
00:29:10.960
or was there a positive or negative experience?
link |
00:29:14.320
Like was blue associated with a positive
link |
00:29:16.400
and red with a negative?
link |
00:29:17.920
Or is it simply the perception of color
link |
00:29:20.960
associated with some characteristic of the song?
link |
00:29:23.440
For me, I don't remember a lot of association
link |
00:29:25.760
with emotion or with value.
link |
00:29:28.320
It was just this kind of weird and interesting fact.
link |
00:29:30.920
I mean, at the beginning, I thought this was something
link |
00:29:32.360
that happened to everyone, songs of colors.
link |
00:29:35.000
Maybe I mentioned it once or twice and people said, nope.
link |
00:29:40.240
I thought it was kind of cool when there was one
link |
00:29:42.560
that had one of these especially pure colors,
link |
00:29:44.680
but only much later once I became a grad student
link |
00:29:48.200
thinking about the mind that I read about this phenomenon
link |
00:29:50.600
called synesthesia and I was like, hey, that's what I had.
link |
00:29:53.960
And now I occasionally talk about it in my classes,
link |
00:29:56.560
in intro class and it still happens sometimes.
link |
00:29:58.600
A student comes up and says, hey, I have that.
link |
00:30:01.120
I never knew about that.
link |
00:30:01.960
I never knew it had a name.
link |
00:30:04.520
You said that it went away at age 20 or so.
link |
00:30:08.080
And that you have a journal entry from around then saying,
link |
00:30:13.080
songs don't have colors anymore.
link |
00:30:15.240
What happened?
link |
00:30:16.080
What happened?
link |
00:30:16.920
Yeah, it was definitely sad that it was gone.
link |
00:30:18.800
In retrospect, it was like, hey, that's cool.
link |
00:30:20.680
The colors have gone.
link |
00:30:21.920
Yeah, can you think about that for a little bit?
link |
00:30:25.000
Do you miss those experiences?
link |
00:30:27.000
Because it's a fundamentally different set of experiences
link |
00:30:31.720
that you no longer have.
link |
00:30:35.120
Or is it just a nice thing to have had?
link |
00:30:38.360
You don't see them as that fundamentally different
link |
00:30:40.640
than you visiting a new country and experiencing
link |
00:30:43.680
new environments.
link |
00:30:44.960
I guess for me, when I had these experiences,
link |
00:30:47.440
they were somewhat marginal.
link |
00:30:48.960
They were like a little bonus kind of experience.
link |
00:30:51.640
I know there are people who have much more serious forms
link |
00:30:55.120
of synesthesia than this for whom it's absolutely central
link |
00:30:58.800
to their lives.
link |
00:30:59.640
I know people who, when they experience new people,
link |
00:31:01.800
they have colors, maybe they have tastes and so on.
link |
00:31:04.760
Every time they see writing, it has colors.
link |
00:31:08.320
Some people, whenever they hear music,
link |
00:31:09.640
it's got a certain really rich color pattern.
link |
00:31:15.040
For some synesthetes, it's absolutely central.
link |
00:31:17.440
I think if they lost it, they'd be devastated.
link |
00:31:20.200
Again, for me, it was a very, very mild form
link |
00:31:23.760
of synesthesia, and it's like, yeah,
link |
00:31:25.560
it's like those interesting experiences
link |
00:31:29.440
you might get under different altered states
link |
00:31:31.560
of consciousness and so on.
link |
00:31:33.360
It's kind of cool, but not necessarily
link |
00:31:36.200
the single most important experiences in your life.
link |
00:31:39.280
Got it.
link |
00:31:40.120
So let's try to go to the very simplest question
link |
00:31:43.920
that you've answered many a time,
link |
00:31:45.120
but perhaps the simplest things can help us reveal,
link |
00:31:48.560
even in time, some new ideas.
link |
00:31:51.680
So what, in your view, is consciousness?
link |
00:31:55.640
What is qualia?
link |
00:31:56.840
What is the hard problem of consciousness?
link |
00:32:00.680
Consciousness, I mean, the word is used many ways,
link |
00:32:03.360
but the kind of consciousness that I'm interested in
link |
00:32:06.240
is basically subjective experience,
link |
00:32:10.000
what it feels like from the inside to be a human being
link |
00:32:14.360
or any other conscious being.
link |
00:32:16.160
I mean, there's something it's like to be me right now.
link |
00:32:19.720
I have visual images that I'm experiencing.
link |
00:32:23.520
I'm hearing my voice.
link |
00:32:25.600
I've got maybe some emotional tone.
link |
00:32:29.120
I've got a stream of thoughts running through my head.
link |
00:32:31.640
These are all things that I experience
link |
00:32:33.600
from the first person point of view.
link |
00:32:36.240
I've sometimes called this the inner movie in the mind.
link |
00:32:39.120
It's not a perfect metaphor.
link |
00:32:41.600
It's not like a movie in every way,
link |
00:32:44.200
and it's very rich.
link |
00:32:45.640
But yeah, it's just direct, subjective experience.
link |
00:32:49.360
And I call that consciousness,
link |
00:32:51.360
or sometimes philosophers use the word qualia,
link |
00:32:54.600
which you suggested.
link |
00:32:55.480
People tend to use the word qualia
link |
00:32:57.040
for things like the qualities of things like colors,
link |
00:33:00.400
redness, the experience of redness
link |
00:33:02.280
versus the experience of greenness,
link |
00:33:04.640
the experience of one taste or one smell versus another,
link |
00:33:08.800
the experience of the quality of pain.
link |
00:33:10.920
And yeah, a lot of consciousness
link |
00:33:12.680
is the experience of those qualities.
link |
00:33:17.000
Well, consciousness is bigger,
link |
00:33:18.240
the entirety of any kinds of experiences.
link |
00:33:21.040
Consciousness of thinking is not obviously qualia.
link |
00:33:23.880
It's not like specific qualities like redness or greenness,
link |
00:33:26.440
but still I'm thinking about my hometown.
link |
00:33:29.200
I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do later on.
link |
00:33:31.680
Maybe there's still something running through my head,
link |
00:33:34.160
which is subjective experience.
link |
00:33:36.320
Maybe it goes beyond those qualities or qualia.
link |
00:33:39.960
Philosophers sometimes use the word phenomenal consciousness
link |
00:33:43.000
for consciousness in this sense.
link |
00:33:44.680
I mean, people also talk about access consciousness,
link |
00:33:47.480
being able to access information in your mind,
link |
00:33:50.280
reflective consciousness,
link |
00:33:52.080
being able to think about yourself.
link |
00:33:53.920
But it looks like the really mysterious one,
link |
00:33:55.920
the one that really gets people going
link |
00:33:57.240
is phenomenal consciousness.
link |
00:33:58.880
The fact that there's subjective experience
link |
00:34:02.760
and all this feels like something at all.
link |
00:34:05.120
And then the hard problem is how is it that,
link |
00:34:08.880
why is it that there is phenomenal consciousness at all?
link |
00:34:11.520
And how is it that physical processes in a brain
link |
00:34:15.600
could give you subjective experience?
link |
00:34:19.400
It looks like on the face of it,
link |
00:34:21.680
you'd have all this big complicated physical system
link |
00:34:23.920
in a brain running without a given
link |
00:34:27.240
subjective experience at all.
link |
00:34:28.480
And yet we do have subjective experience.
link |
00:34:30.840
So the hard problem is just explain that.
link |
00:34:34.160
Explain how that comes about.
link |
00:34:35.960
We haven't been able to build machines
link |
00:34:37.560
where a red light goes on that says it's not conscious.
link |
00:34:41.320
So how do we actually create that?
link |
00:34:45.720
Or how do humans do it?
link |
00:34:47.360
And how do we ourselves do it?
link |
00:34:49.000
We do every now and then create machines that can do this.
link |
00:34:51.720
We create babies that are conscious.
link |
00:34:55.600
They've got these brains.
link |
00:34:56.560
That brain does produce consciousness.
link |
00:34:58.440
But even though we can create it,
link |
00:35:00.680
we still don't understand why it happens.
link |
00:35:02.880
Maybe eventually we'll be able to create machines,
link |
00:35:05.440
which as a matter of fact, AI machines,
link |
00:35:07.840
which as a matter of fact are conscious.
link |
00:35:10.280
But that won't necessarily make the hard problem go away
link |
00:35:13.760
any more than it does with babies.
link |
00:35:15.480
Cause we still wanna know how and why is it
link |
00:35:17.480
that these processes give you consciousness?
link |
00:35:19.680
You just made me realize for a second,
link |
00:35:22.160
maybe it's a totally dumb realization, but nevertheless,
link |
00:35:28.520
that as a useful way to think about
link |
00:35:31.840
the creation of consciousness is looking at a baby.
link |
00:35:35.760
So that there's a certain point
link |
00:35:38.480
at which that baby is not conscious.
link |
00:35:44.400
The baby starts from maybe, I don't know,
link |
00:35:47.160
from a few cells, right?
link |
00:35:49.600
There's a certain point at which it becomes consciousness,
link |
00:35:52.760
arrives, it's conscious.
link |
00:35:54.920
Of course, we can't know exactly that line,
link |
00:35:56.880
but that's a useful idea that we do create consciousness.
link |
00:36:02.280
Again, a really dumb thing for me to say,
link |
00:36:04.560
but not until now did I realize
link |
00:36:07.000
we do engineer consciousness.
link |
00:36:09.640
We get to watch the process happen.
link |
00:36:12.240
We don't know which point it happens or where it is,
link |
00:36:16.200
but we do see the birth of consciousness.
link |
00:36:19.200
Yeah, I mean, there's a question, of course,
link |
00:36:21.080
is whether babies are conscious when they're born.
link |
00:36:25.000
And it used to be, it seems,
link |
00:36:26.320
at least some people thought they weren't,
link |
00:36:28.240
which is why they didn't give anesthetics
link |
00:36:30.520
to newborn babies when they circumcised them.
link |
00:36:33.160
And so now people think, oh, that would be incredibly cruel.
link |
00:36:36.600
Of course, babies feel pain.
link |
00:36:38.760
And now the dominant view is that the babies can feel pain.
link |
00:36:42.120
Actually, my partner Claudia works on this whole issue
link |
00:36:45.840
of whether there's consciousness in babies
link |
00:36:48.160
and of what kind.
link |
00:36:49.720
And she certainly thinks that newborn babies
link |
00:36:53.280
come into the world with some degree of consciousness.
link |
00:36:55.480
Of course, then you can just extend the question backwards
link |
00:36:57.320
to fetuses and suddenly you're into
link |
00:36:59.320
politically controversial territory.
link |
00:37:02.120
But the question also arises in the animal kingdom.
link |
00:37:06.840
Where does consciousness start or stop?
link |
00:37:08.640
Is there a line in the animal kingdom
link |
00:37:11.960
where the first conscious organisms are?
link |
00:37:15.920
It's interesting, over time,
link |
00:37:16.920
people are becoming more and more liberal
link |
00:37:18.240
about ascribing consciousness to animals.
link |
00:37:21.080
People used to think maybe only mammals could be conscious.
link |
00:37:24.520
Now most people seem to think, sure, fish are conscious.
link |
00:37:27.440
They can feel pain.
link |
00:37:28.760
And now we're arguing over insects.
link |
00:37:31.000
You'll find people out there who say plants
link |
00:37:33.440
have some degree of consciousness.
link |
00:37:35.600
So, you know, who knows where it's gonna end.
link |
00:37:37.840
The far end of this chain is the view
link |
00:37:39.360
that every physical system has some degree of consciousness.
link |
00:37:43.320
Philosophers call that panpsychism.
link |
00:37:45.960
You know, I take that view.
link |
00:37:48.320
I mean, that's a fascinating way to view reality.
link |
00:37:50.920
So if you could talk about,
link |
00:37:52.840
if you can linger on panpsychism for a little bit,
link |
00:37:56.520
what does it mean?
link |
00:37:58.400
So it's not just plants are conscious.
link |
00:38:00.960
I mean, it's that consciousness
link |
00:38:02.480
is a fundamental fabric of reality.
link |
00:38:05.360
What does that mean to you?
link |
00:38:07.360
How are we supposed to think about that?
link |
00:38:09.640
Well, we're used to the idea that some things in the world
link |
00:38:12.120
are fundamental, right, in physics.
link |
00:38:15.240
Like what?
link |
00:38:16.080
We take things like space or time or space time,
link |
00:38:18.800
mass, charges, fundamental properties of the universe.
link |
00:38:23.120
You don't reduce them to something simpler.
link |
00:38:25.440
You take those for granted.
link |
00:38:26.920
You've got some laws that connect them.
link |
00:38:30.120
Here is how mass and space and time evolve.
link |
00:38:33.800
Theories like relativity or quantum mechanics
link |
00:38:36.600
or some future theory that will unify them both.
link |
00:38:39.960
But everyone says you gotta take some things as fundamental.
link |
00:38:42.520
And if you can't explain one thing,
link |
00:38:44.600
in terms of the previous fundamental things,
link |
00:38:47.120
you have to expand.
link |
00:38:49.240
Maybe something like this happened with Maxwell.
link |
00:38:52.800
He ended up with fundamental principles
link |
00:38:54.160
of electromagnetism and took charge as fundamental
link |
00:38:57.480
because it turned out that was the best way to explain it.
link |
00:39:00.120
So I at least take seriously the possibility
link |
00:39:02.840
something like that could happen with consciousness.
link |
00:39:06.080
Take it as a fundamental property,
link |
00:39:07.600
like space, time, and mass.
link |
00:39:10.120
And instead of trying to explain consciousness wholly
link |
00:39:13.760
in terms of the evolution of space, time, and mass,
link |
00:39:17.480
and so on, take it as a primitive
link |
00:39:20.000
and then connect it to everything else
link |
00:39:23.000
by some fundamental laws.
link |
00:39:25.200
Because there's this basic problem
link |
00:39:27.120
that the physics we have now looks great
link |
00:39:29.080
for solving the easy problems of consciousness,
link |
00:39:31.800
which are all about behavior.
link |
00:39:35.280
They give us a complicated structure and dynamics.
link |
00:39:37.440
They tell us how things are gonna behave,
link |
00:39:39.640
what kind of observable behavior they'll produce,
link |
00:39:43.160
which is great for the problems of explaining how we walk
link |
00:39:46.400
and how we talk and so on.
link |
00:39:48.600
Those are the easy problems of consciousness.
link |
00:39:50.640
But the hard problem was this problem
link |
00:39:52.560
about subjective experience just doesn't look
link |
00:39:55.360
like that kind of problem about structure,
link |
00:39:57.000
dynamics, how things behave.
link |
00:39:58.800
So it's hard to see how existing physics
link |
00:40:01.320
is gonna give you a full explanation of that.
link |
00:40:04.680
Certainly trying to get a physics view of consciousness,
link |
00:40:08.000
yes, there has to be a connecting point
link |
00:40:10.960
and it could be at the very axiomatic
link |
00:40:12.600
at the very beginning level.
link |
00:40:14.120
But first of all, there's a crazy idea
link |
00:40:21.960
that sort of everything has properties of consciousness.
link |
00:40:27.640
At that point, the word consciousness
link |
00:40:30.080
is already beyond the reach of our current understanding.
link |
00:40:33.000
Like far, because it's so far from,
link |
00:40:35.800
at least for me, maybe you can correct me,
link |
00:40:38.760
as far from the experiences that I have as a human being.
link |
00:40:45.680
To say that everything is conscious,
link |
00:40:47.360
that means that basically another way to put that,
link |
00:40:52.840
if that's true, then we understand almost nothing
link |
00:40:56.840
about that fundamental aspect of the world.
link |
00:41:00.120
How do you feel about saying an ant is conscious?
link |
00:41:02.760
Do you get the same reaction to that
link |
00:41:04.040
or is that something you can understand?
link |
00:41:05.760
I can understand ant,
link |
00:41:06.880
I can understand an atom, a particle.
link |
00:41:10.680
Plants?
link |
00:41:12.120
Plant, so I'm comfortable with living things on Earth
link |
00:41:16.640
being conscious because there's some kind of agency
link |
00:41:22.040
where they're similar size to me
link |
00:41:26.480
and they can be born and they can die.
link |
00:41:30.800
And that is understandable intuitively.
link |
00:41:34.400
Of course, you anthropomorphize,
link |
00:41:36.720
you put yourself in the place of the plant,
link |
00:41:41.720
but I can understand it.
link |
00:41:43.240
I mean, I'm not like, I don't believe actually
link |
00:41:47.600
that plants are conscious or that plants suffer,
link |
00:41:49.600
but I can understand that kind of belief, that kind of idea.
link |
00:41:52.960
How do you feel about robots?
link |
00:41:54.920
Like the kind of robots we have now?
link |
00:41:56.760
If I told you like that a Roomba
link |
00:41:58.880
had some degree of consciousness
link |
00:42:02.280
or some deep neural network.
link |
00:42:06.120
I could understand that a Roomba has consciousness.
link |
00:42:08.440
I just had spent all day at I, robot.
link |
00:42:12.600
And I mean, I personally love robots
link |
00:42:15.200
and I have a deep connection with robots.
link |
00:42:16.960
So I can, I also probably anthropomorphize them.
link |
00:42:20.040
There's something about the physical object.
link |
00:42:23.880
So there's a difference than a neural network,
link |
00:42:26.800
a neural network running a software.
link |
00:42:28.960
To me, the physical object,
link |
00:42:31.040
something about the human experience
link |
00:42:32.680
allows me to really see that physical object as an entity.
link |
00:42:36.920
And if it moves and moves in a way that it,
link |
00:42:40.920
there's a, like I didn't program it,
link |
00:42:44.400
where it feels that it's acting based on its own perception.
link |
00:42:49.680
And yes, self awareness and consciousness,
link |
00:42:53.440
even if it's a Roomba,
link |
00:42:55.440
then you start to assign it some agency, some consciousness.
link |
00:43:00.440
So, but to say that panpsychism,
link |
00:43:03.800
that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality
link |
00:43:08.440
is a much bigger statement.
link |
00:43:11.360
That it's like turtles all the way.
link |
00:43:13.600
It's like every, it's, it doesn't end.
link |
00:43:16.080
The whole thing is, so like how,
link |
00:43:18.360
I know it's full of mystery,
link |
00:43:21.120
but if you can linger on it,
link |
00:43:23.880
like how would it, how do you think about reality
link |
00:43:27.600
if consciousness is a fundamental part of its fabric?
link |
00:43:31.840
The way you get there is from thinking,
link |
00:43:33.300
can we explain consciousness given the existing fundamentals?
link |
00:43:36.520
And then if you can't, as at least right now, it looks like,
link |
00:43:41.120
then you've got to add something.
link |
00:43:42.320
It doesn't follow that you have to add consciousness.
link |
00:43:44.920
Here's another interesting possibility is,
link |
00:43:47.000
well, we'll add something else.
link |
00:43:48.020
Let's call it proto consciousness or X.
link |
00:43:51.640
And then it turns out space, time, mass plus X
link |
00:43:56.120
will somehow collectively give you the possibility
link |
00:43:58.920
for consciousness.
link |
00:44:00.200
Why don't rule out that view?
link |
00:44:01.780
Either I call that pan proto psychism,
link |
00:44:04.760
because maybe there's some other property,
link |
00:44:06.240
proto consciousness at the bottom level.
link |
00:44:08.880
And if you can't imagine there's actually
link |
00:44:10.480
genuine consciousness at the bottom level,
link |
00:44:12.800
I think we should be open to the idea
link |
00:44:14.100
there's this other thing X.
link |
00:44:16.160
Maybe we can't imagine that somehow gives you consciousness.
link |
00:44:19.960
But if we are playing along with the idea
link |
00:44:22.360
that there really is genuine consciousness
link |
00:44:24.320
at the bottom level, of course,
link |
00:44:25.360
this is going to be way out and speculative,
link |
00:44:28.280
but at least in, say, if it was classical physics,
link |
00:44:32.040
then we'd have to, you'd end up saying,
link |
00:44:33.480
well, every little atom, every little,
link |
00:44:35.280
with a bunch of particles in space time,
link |
00:44:37.640
each of these particles has some kind of consciousness
link |
00:44:41.560
whose structure mirrors maybe their physical properties,
link |
00:44:44.560
like its mass, its charge, its velocity, and so on.
link |
00:44:49.080
The structure of its consciousness
link |
00:44:50.320
would roughly correspond to that.
link |
00:44:52.280
And the physical interactions between particles,
link |
00:44:55.440
I mean, there's this old worry about physics.
link |
00:44:58.280
I mentioned this before in this issue
link |
00:44:59.560
about the manifest image.
link |
00:45:01.120
We don't really find out
link |
00:45:02.080
about the intrinsic nature of things.
link |
00:45:04.560
Physics tells us about how a particle relates
link |
00:45:07.440
to other particles and interacts.
link |
00:45:09.320
It doesn't tell us about what the particle is in itself.
link |
00:45:12.840
That was Kant's thing in itself.
link |
00:45:14.600
So here's a view.
link |
00:45:17.880
The nature in itself of a particle is something mental.
link |
00:45:20.840
A particle is actually a conscious,
link |
00:45:22.840
a little conscious subject
link |
00:45:24.520
with properties of its consciousness
link |
00:45:27.320
that correspond to its physical properties.
link |
00:45:29.160
The laws of physics are actually ultimately relating
link |
00:45:32.640
these properties of conscious subjects.
link |
00:45:34.560
So in this view, a Newtonian world
link |
00:45:36.640
actually would be a vast collection
link |
00:45:38.200
of little conscious subjects at the bottom level,
link |
00:45:41.240
way, way simpler than we are without free will
link |
00:45:44.960
or rationality or anything like that.
link |
00:45:47.280
But that's what the universe would be like.
link |
00:45:48.800
Now, of course, that's a vastly speculative view.
link |
00:45:51.360
No particular reason to think it's correct.
link |
00:45:53.600
Furthermore, non Newtonian physics,
link |
00:45:56.480
say quantum mechanical wave function,
link |
00:45:58.960
suddenly it starts to look different.
link |
00:46:00.120
It's not a vast collection of conscious subjects.
link |
00:46:02.600
Maybe there's ultimately one big wave function
link |
00:46:05.360
for the whole universe.
link |
00:46:06.760
Corresponding to that might be something more
link |
00:46:08.440
like a single conscious mind
link |
00:46:12.280
whose structure corresponds
link |
00:46:13.840
to the structure of the wave function.
link |
00:46:16.280
People sometimes call this cosmo psychism.
link |
00:46:19.160
And now, of course, we're in the realm
link |
00:46:20.880
of extremely speculative philosophy.
link |
00:46:23.200
There's no direct evidence for this,
link |
00:46:25.160
but yeah, but if you want a picture
link |
00:46:27.320
of what that universe would be like,
link |
00:46:29.280
think, yeah, giant cosmic mind
link |
00:46:31.680
with enough richness and structure among it
link |
00:46:33.920
to replicate all the structure of physics.
link |
00:46:36.520
I think therefore I am at the level of particles
link |
00:46:39.720
and with quantum mechanics
link |
00:46:40.960
at the level of the wave function.
link |
00:46:42.640
It's kind of an exciting, beautiful possibility,
link |
00:46:49.440
of course, way out of reach of physics currently.
link |
00:46:51.960
It is interesting that some neuroscientists
link |
00:46:55.040
are beginning to take panpsychism seriously,
link |
00:46:58.680
that you find consciousness even in very simple systems.
link |
00:47:02.880
So for example, the integrated information theory
link |
00:47:05.560
of consciousness, a lot of neuroscientists
link |
00:47:07.360
are taking seriously.
link |
00:47:08.200
Actually, I just got this new book
link |
00:47:09.920
by Christoph Koch just came in,
link |
00:47:11.720
The Feeling of Life Itself,
link |
00:47:13.680
why consciousness is widespread, but can't be computed.
link |
00:47:17.200
He likes, he basically endorses a panpsychist view
link |
00:47:20.560
where you get consciousness
link |
00:47:22.280
with the degree of information processing
link |
00:47:24.520
or integrated information processing in a simple,
link |
00:47:26.960
in a system and even very, very simple systems,
link |
00:47:29.520
like a couple of particles will have some degree of this.
link |
00:47:32.720
So he ends up with some degree of consciousness
link |
00:47:35.240
in all matter.
link |
00:47:36.080
And the claim is that this theory
link |
00:47:38.680
can actually explain a bunch of stuff
link |
00:47:40.520
about the connection between the brain and consciousness.
link |
00:47:43.600
Now, that's very controversial.
link |
00:47:45.360
I think it's very, very early days
link |
00:47:46.920
in the science of consciousness.
link |
00:47:48.120
It's interesting that it's not just philosophy
link |
00:47:50.840
that might lead you in this direction,
link |
00:47:52.680
but there are ways of thinking quasi scientifically
link |
00:47:55.280
that lead you there too.
link |
00:47:57.400
But maybe it's different than panpsychism.
link |
00:48:01.200
What do you think?
link |
00:48:02.040
So Alan Watts has this quote that I'd like to ask you about.
link |
00:48:06.960
The quote is, through our eyes,
link |
00:48:10.440
the universe is perceiving itself.
link |
00:48:12.760
Through our ears, the universe is listening
link |
00:48:14.640
to its harmonies.
link |
00:48:16.120
We are the witnesses through which the universe
link |
00:48:18.040
becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
link |
00:48:22.440
So that's not panpsychism.
link |
00:48:24.800
Do you think that we are essentially the tools,
link |
00:48:30.480
the senses the universe created to be conscious of itself?
link |
00:48:35.480
It's an interesting idea.
link |
00:48:37.520
Of course, if you went for the giant cosmic mind view,
link |
00:48:40.520
then the universe was conscious all along.
link |
00:48:43.360
It didn't need us.
link |
00:48:44.200
We're just little components of the universal consciousness.
link |
00:48:48.120
Likewise, if you believe in panpsychism,
link |
00:48:50.800
then there was some little degree of consciousness
link |
00:48:52.840
at the bottom level all along.
link |
00:48:54.680
And we were just a more complex form of consciousness.
link |
00:48:58.240
So I think maybe the quote you mentioned works better.
link |
00:49:02.040
If you're not a panpsychist, you're not a cosmo psychist,
link |
00:49:05.120
you think consciousness just exists
link |
00:49:07.240
at this intermediate level.
link |
00:49:09.360
And of course, that's the Orthodox view.
link |
00:49:12.320
That you would say is the common view?
link |
00:49:14.680
So is your own view with panpsychism a rare view?
link |
00:49:19.880
I think it's generally regarded certainly
link |
00:49:22.160
as a speculative view held by a fairly small minority
link |
00:49:26.480
of at least theorists, most philosophers
link |
00:49:30.000
and most scientists who think about consciousness
link |
00:49:33.040
are not panpsychists.
link |
00:49:34.600
There's been a bit of a movement in that direction
link |
00:49:36.240
the last 10 years or so.
link |
00:49:37.920
It seems to be quite popular,
link |
00:49:38.960
especially among the younger generation,
link |
00:49:41.600
but it's still very definitely a minority view.
link |
00:49:43.960
Many people think it's totally batshit crazy
link |
00:49:47.120
to use the technical term.
link |
00:49:48.320
But the philosophical term.
link |
00:49:51.360
So the Orthodox view, I think is still consciousness
link |
00:49:53.400
is something that humans have
link |
00:49:55.160
and some good number of nonhuman animals have,
link |
00:49:59.000
and maybe AIs might have one day, but it's restricted.
link |
00:50:02.720
On that view, then there was no consciousness
link |
00:50:04.400
at the start of the universe.
link |
00:50:05.840
There may be none at the end,
link |
00:50:07.200
but it is this thing which happened at some point
link |
00:50:09.920
in the history of the universe, consciousness developed.
link |
00:50:13.160
And yes, that's a very amazing event on this view
link |
00:50:17.440
because many people are inclined to think consciousness
link |
00:50:20.280
is what somehow gives meaning to our lives.
link |
00:50:23.160
Without consciousness, there'd be no meaning,
link |
00:50:25.760
no true value, no good versus bad and so on.
link |
00:50:29.720
So with the advent of consciousness,
link |
00:50:32.200
suddenly the universe went from meaningless
link |
00:50:36.000
to somehow meaningful.
link |
00:50:38.760
Why did this happen?
link |
00:50:39.840
I guess the quote you mentioned was somehow,
link |
00:50:42.200
this was somehow destined to happen
link |
00:50:44.360
because the universe needed to have consciousness
link |
00:50:47.360
within it to have value and have meaning.
link |
00:50:49.280
And maybe you could combine that with a theistic view
link |
00:50:52.680
or a teleological view.
link |
00:50:54.640
The universe was inexorably evolving towards consciousness.
link |
00:50:58.440
Actually, my colleague here at NYU, Tom Nagel,
link |
00:51:01.440
wrote a book called Mind and Cosmos a few years ago
link |
00:51:04.200
where he argued for this teleological view
link |
00:51:06.080
of evolution toward consciousness,
link |
00:51:09.040
saying this led the problems for Darwinism.
link |
00:51:12.640
It's got him on, this is very, very controversial.
link |
00:51:15.120
Most people didn't agree.
link |
00:51:16.640
I don't myself agree with this teleological view,
link |
00:51:20.080
but it is at least a beautiful speculative view
link |
00:51:24.120
of the cosmos.
link |
00:51:26.160
What do you think people experience?
link |
00:51:30.640
What do they seek when they believe in God
link |
00:51:32.920
from this kind of perspective?
link |
00:51:36.200
I'm not an expert on thinking about God and religion.
link |
00:51:41.440
I'm not myself religious at all.
link |
00:51:43.880
When people sort of pray, communicate with God,
link |
00:51:46.720
which whatever form,
link |
00:51:48.120
I'm not speaking to sort of the practices
link |
00:51:51.640
and the rituals of religion.
link |
00:51:53.800
I mean the actual experience of that people
link |
00:51:56.960
really have a deep connection with God in some cases.
link |
00:52:00.920
What do you think that experience is?
link |
00:52:06.280
It's so common, at least throughout the history
link |
00:52:08.680
of civilization, that it seems like we seek that.
link |
00:52:16.360
At the very least, it is an interesting
link |
00:52:17.960
conscious experience that people have
link |
00:52:19.600
when they experience religious awe or prayer and so on.
link |
00:52:24.600
Neuroscientists have tried to examine
link |
00:52:27.200
what bits of the brain are active and so on.
link |
00:52:30.160
But yeah, there's this deeper question
link |
00:52:32.120
of what are people looking for when they're doing this?
link |
00:52:34.800
And like I said, I've got no real expertise on this,
link |
00:52:38.440
but it does seem that one thing people are after
link |
00:52:40.920
is a sense of meaning and value,
link |
00:52:43.240
a sense of connection to something greater than themselves
link |
00:52:48.160
that will give their lives meaning and value.
link |
00:52:50.280
And maybe the thought is if there is a God,
link |
00:52:52.600
then God somehow is a universal consciousness
link |
00:52:56.120
who has invested this universe with meaning
link |
00:53:01.080
and somehow connection to God might give your life meaning.
link |
00:53:05.680
I guess I can kind of see the attractions of that,
link |
00:53:09.840
but it still makes me wonder why is it exactly
link |
00:53:13.000
that a universal consciousness, God,
link |
00:53:15.920
would be needed to give the world meaning?
link |
00:53:18.480
If universal consciousness can give the world meaning,
link |
00:53:21.760
why can't local consciousness give the world meaning too?
link |
00:53:25.280
So I think my consciousness gives my world meaning.
link |
00:53:28.480
Is the origin of meaning for your world.
link |
00:53:31.080
Yeah, I experience things as good or bad,
link |
00:53:33.840
happy, sad, interesting, important.
link |
00:53:37.480
So my consciousness invests this world with meaning.
link |
00:53:40.560
Without any consciousness,
link |
00:53:42.160
maybe it would be a bleak, meaningless universe.
link |
00:53:45.320
But I don't see why I need someone else's consciousness
link |
00:53:47.680
or even God's consciousness to give this universe meaning.
link |
00:53:51.480
Here we are, local creatures
link |
00:53:53.160
with our own subjective experiences.
link |
00:53:55.160
I think we can give the universe meaning ourselves.
link |
00:53:58.920
I mean, maybe to some people that feels inadequate.
link |
00:54:02.000
Our own local consciousness is somehow too puny
link |
00:54:04.920
and insignificant to invest any of this
link |
00:54:07.320
with cosmic significance.
link |
00:54:09.320
And maybe God gives you a sense of cosmic significance,
link |
00:54:13.680
but I'm just speculating here.
link |
00:54:15.720
So it's a really interesting idea
link |
00:54:19.280
that consciousness is the thing that makes life meaningful.
link |
00:54:24.800
If you could maybe just briefly explore that for a second.
link |
00:54:30.400
So I suspect just from listening to you now,
link |
00:54:33.760
you mean in an almost trivial sense,
link |
00:54:37.400
just the day to day experiences of life have,
link |
00:54:42.320
because of you attach identity to it,
link |
00:54:46.920
they become, I guess I wanna ask something
link |
00:54:54.600
I would always wanted to ask
link |
00:54:57.120
a legit world renowned philosopher.
link |
00:55:01.920
What is the meaning of life?
link |
00:55:05.200
So I suspect you don't mean consciousness gives
link |
00:55:08.080
any kind of greater meaning to it all.
link |
00:55:11.280
And more to day to day.
link |
00:55:13.360
But is there a greater meaning to it all?
link |
00:55:16.240
I think life has meaning for us because we are conscious.
link |
00:55:20.920
So without consciousness, no meaning,
link |
00:55:24.120
consciousness invests our life with meaning.
link |
00:55:27.280
So consciousness is the source of the meaning of life,
link |
00:55:30.680
but I wouldn't say consciousness itself
link |
00:55:33.320
is the meaning of life.
link |
00:55:34.760
I'd say what's meaningful in life
link |
00:55:36.960
is basically what we find meaningful,
link |
00:55:40.000
what we experience as meaningful.
link |
00:55:42.640
So if you find meaning and fulfillment and value
link |
00:55:46.280
in say, intellectual work, like understanding,
link |
00:55:49.080
then that's a very significant part
link |
00:55:51.720
of the meaning of life for you.
link |
00:55:53.200
If you find that in social connections
link |
00:55:55.680
or in raising a family,
link |
00:55:57.400
then that's the meaning of life for you.
link |
00:55:58.960
The meaning kind of comes from what you value
link |
00:56:02.080
as a conscious creature.
link |
00:56:04.040
So I think there's no, on this view,
link |
00:56:05.280
there's no universal solution.
link |
00:56:08.640
No universal answer to the question,
link |
00:56:10.160
what is the meaning of life?
link |
00:56:11.480
The meaning of life is where you find it
link |
00:56:13.520
as a conscious creature,
link |
00:56:14.600
but it's consciousness that somehow makes value possible.
link |
00:56:18.040
Experiencing some things as good or as bad
link |
00:56:21.000
or as meaningful,
link |
00:56:22.840
something comes from within consciousness.
link |
00:56:24.600
So you think consciousness is a crucial component,
link |
00:56:28.760
ingredient of assigning value to things?
link |
00:56:33.520
I mean, it's kind of a fairly strong intuition
link |
00:56:36.080
that without consciousness,
link |
00:56:37.520
there wouldn't really be any value
link |
00:56:39.920
if we just had a purely universe of unconscious creatures.
link |
00:56:44.600
Would anything be better or worse than anything else?
link |
00:56:47.680
Certainly when it comes to ethical dilemmas,
link |
00:56:50.320
you know about the old trolley problem.
link |
00:56:53.160
Do you kill one person
link |
00:56:56.240
or do you switch to the other track to kill five?
link |
00:56:59.600
Well, I've got a variant on this,
link |
00:57:01.680
the zombie trolley problem,
link |
00:57:03.440
where there's a one conscious being on one track
link |
00:57:06.720
and five humanoid zombies.
link |
00:57:09.120
Let's make them robots who are not conscious
link |
00:57:12.880
on the other track.
link |
00:57:15.520
Do you, given that choice,
link |
00:57:16.640
do you kill the one conscious being
link |
00:57:17.920
or the five unconscious robots?
link |
00:57:21.040
Most people have a fairly clear intuition here.
link |
00:57:23.360
Kill the unconscious beings
link |
00:57:25.560
because they basically, they don't have a meaningful life.
link |
00:57:28.720
They're not really persons, conscious beings at all.
link |
00:57:33.760
We don't have good intuition
link |
00:57:36.640
about something like an unconscious being.
link |
00:57:42.040
So in philosophical terms, you referred to as a zombie.
link |
00:57:46.720
It's a useful thought experiment construction
link |
00:57:51.120
in philosophical terms, but we don't yet have them.
link |
00:57:55.880
So that's kind of what we may be able to create with robots.
link |
00:58:00.240
And I don't necessarily know what that even means.
link |
00:58:05.240
Yeah, they're merely hypothetical.
link |
00:58:07.280
For now, they're just a thought experiment.
link |
00:58:09.640
They may never be possible.
link |
00:58:11.040
I mean, the extreme case of a zombie
link |
00:58:13.480
is a being which is physically, functionally,
link |
00:58:16.400
behaviorally identical to me, but not conscious.
link |
00:58:19.520
That's a mere,
link |
00:58:20.560
I don't think that could ever be built in this universe.
link |
00:58:23.520
The question is just could we,
link |
00:58:24.840
does that hypothetically make sense?
link |
00:58:27.000
That's kind of a useful contrast class
link |
00:58:29.360
to raise questions like, why aren't we zombies?
link |
00:58:31.800
How does it come about that we're conscious?
link |
00:58:33.840
And we're not like that.
link |
00:58:34.960
But there are less extreme versions of this like robots,
link |
00:58:38.640
which are maybe not physically identical to us,
link |
00:58:41.560
maybe not even functionally identical to us.
link |
00:58:43.360
Maybe they've got a different architecture,
link |
00:58:45.360
but they can do a lot of sophisticated things,
link |
00:58:47.720
maybe carry on a conversation, but they're not conscious.
link |
00:58:51.160
And that's not so far out.
link |
00:58:52.160
We've got simple computer systems,
link |
00:58:54.920
at least tending in that direction now.
link |
00:58:57.400
And presumably this is gonna get more and more sophisticated
link |
00:59:01.120
over years to come where we may have some pretty,
link |
00:59:05.320
it's at least quite straightforward to conceive
link |
00:59:07.240
of some pretty sophisticated robot systems
link |
00:59:11.160
that can use language and be fairly high functioning
link |
00:59:14.800
without consciousness at all.
link |
00:59:16.400
Then I stipulate that.
link |
00:59:17.800
I mean, we've caused, there's this tricky question
link |
00:59:21.600
of how you would know whether they're conscious.
link |
00:59:23.680
But let's say we've somehow solved that.
link |
00:59:25.000
And we know that these high functioning robots
link |
00:59:27.120
aren't conscious.
link |
00:59:27.960
Then the question is, do they have moral status?
link |
00:59:30.240
Does it matter how we treat them?
link |
00:59:33.480
What does moral status mean, sir?
link |
00:59:35.760
Basically it's that question.
link |
00:59:37.160
Can they suffer?
link |
00:59:38.480
Does it matter how we treat them?
link |
00:59:41.040
For example, if I mistreat this glass, this cup
link |
00:59:46.040
by shattering it, then that's bad.
link |
00:59:49.760
Why is it bad though?
link |
00:59:50.600
It's gonna make a mess.
link |
00:59:51.440
It's gonna be annoying for me and my partner.
link |
00:59:53.600
And so it's not bad for the cup.
link |
00:59:55.920
No one would say the cup itself has moral status.
link |
00:59:59.560
Hey, you hurt the cup and that's doing it a moral harm.
link |
01:00:07.680
Likewise, plants, well, again, if they're not conscious,
link |
01:00:09.880
most people think by uprooting a plant,
link |
01:00:11.960
you're not harming it.
link |
01:00:13.520
But if a being is conscious on the other hand,
link |
01:00:16.160
then you are harming it.
link |
01:00:17.200
So Siri, or I dare not say the name of Alexa.
link |
01:00:24.960
Anyway, so we don't think we're morally harming Alexa
link |
01:00:28.600
by turning her off or disconnecting her
link |
01:00:30.440
or even destroying her, whether it's the system
link |
01:00:34.080
or the underlying software system,
link |
01:00:36.160
because we don't really think she's conscious.
link |
01:00:39.040
On the other hand, you move to like the disembodied being
link |
01:00:42.400
in the movie, her, Samantha,
link |
01:00:45.520
I guess she was kind of presented as conscious.
link |
01:00:47.480
And then if you destroyed her,
link |
01:00:49.760
you'd certainly be committing a serious harm.
link |
01:00:51.760
So I think our strong sense is if a being is conscious
link |
01:00:55.200
and can undergo subjective experiences,
link |
01:00:57.440
then it matters morally how we treat them.
link |
01:01:00.360
So if a robot is conscious, it matters,
link |
01:01:03.040
but if a robot is not conscious,
link |
01:01:05.360
then they're basically just meat or a machine
link |
01:01:07.160
and it doesn't matter.
link |
01:01:10.360
So I think at least maybe how we think about this stuff
link |
01:01:13.000
is fundamentally wrong,
link |
01:01:13.960
but I think a lot of people
link |
01:01:15.480
who think about this stuff seriously,
link |
01:01:17.200
including people who think about,
link |
01:01:18.320
say the moral treatment of animals and so on,
link |
01:01:20.800
come to the view that consciousness
link |
01:01:23.360
is ultimately kind of the line between systems
link |
01:01:25.760
that where we have to take them into account
link |
01:01:29.320
and thinking morally about how we act
link |
01:01:32.240
and systems for which we don't.
link |
01:01:34.440
And I think I've seen you the writer talk about
link |
01:01:38.560
the demonstration of consciousness from a system like that,
link |
01:01:41.800
from a system like Alexa or a conversational agent
link |
01:01:48.120
that what you would be looking for
link |
01:01:51.160
is kind of at the very basic level
link |
01:01:54.600
for the system to have an awareness
link |
01:01:58.160
that I'm just a program
link |
01:02:00.440
and yet, why do I experience this?
link |
01:02:03.880
Or not to have that experience,
link |
01:02:06.160
but to communicate that to you.
link |
01:02:08.000
So that's what us humans would sound like.
link |
01:02:10.680
If you all of a sudden woke up one day,
link |
01:02:13.000
like Kafka, right, in a body of a bug or something,
link |
01:02:15.600
but in a computer, you all of a sudden realized
link |
01:02:18.320
you don't have a body
link |
01:02:19.720
and yet you were feeling what you were feeling,
link |
01:02:22.480
you would probably say those kinds of things.
link |
01:02:25.920
So do you think a system essentially becomes conscious
link |
01:02:29.520
by convincing us that it's conscious
link |
01:02:34.400
through the words that I just mentioned?
link |
01:02:36.200
So by being confused about the fact
link |
01:02:40.080
that why am I having these experiences?
link |
01:02:45.000
So basically.
link |
01:02:45.840
I don't think this is what makes you conscious,
link |
01:02:48.080
but I do think being puzzled about consciousness
link |
01:02:50.240
is a very good sign that a system is conscious.
link |
01:02:53.280
So if I encountered a robot
link |
01:02:55.600
that actually seemed to be genuinely puzzled
link |
01:02:58.640
by its own mental states
link |
01:03:01.280
and saying, yeah, I have all these weird experiences
link |
01:03:04.000
and I don't see how to explain them.
link |
01:03:06.320
I know I'm just a set of silicon circuits,
link |
01:03:08.720
but I don't see how that would give you my consciousness.
link |
01:03:11.600
I would at least take that as some evidence
link |
01:03:13.840
that there's some consciousness going on there.
link |
01:03:16.720
I don't think a system needs to be puzzled
link |
01:03:19.440
about consciousness to be conscious.
link |
01:03:21.760
Many people aren't puzzled by their consciousness.
link |
01:03:24.000
Animals don't seem to be puzzled at all.
link |
01:03:26.320
I still think they're conscious.
link |
01:03:28.000
So I don't think that's a requirement on consciousness,
link |
01:03:30.680
but I do think if we're looking for signs
link |
01:03:33.360
for consciousness, say in AI systems,
link |
01:03:37.000
one of the things that will help convince me
link |
01:03:39.120
that an AI system is conscious is if it shows signs of,
link |
01:03:44.080
if it shows signs of introspectively recognizing something
link |
01:03:47.360
like consciousness and finding this philosophically puzzling
link |
01:03:51.280
in the way that we do.
link |
01:03:54.200
It's such an interesting thought, though,
link |
01:03:55.920
because a lot of people sort of would,
link |
01:03:57.920
at the Shao level, criticize the Turing test for language.
link |
01:04:02.160
It's essentially what I heard Dan Dennett
link |
01:04:07.600
criticize it in this kind of way,
link |
01:04:09.800
which is it really puts a lot of emphasis on lying.
link |
01:04:13.280
Yeah, and being able to imitate
link |
01:04:17.080
human beings, yeah, there's this cartoon
link |
01:04:20.480
of the AI system studying for the Turing test.
link |
01:04:23.240
It's gotta read this book called Talk Like a Human.
link |
01:04:26.680
It's like, man, why do I have to waste my time
link |
01:04:28.360
learning how to imitate humans?
link |
01:04:30.480
Maybe the AI system is gonna be way beyond
link |
01:04:32.280
the hard problem of consciousness,
link |
01:04:33.800
and it's gonna be just like,
link |
01:04:34.760
why do I need to waste my time pretending
link |
01:04:36.400
that I recognize the hard problem of consciousness
link |
01:04:40.120
in order for people to recognize me as conscious?
link |
01:04:42.160
Yeah, it just feels like, I guess the question is,
link |
01:04:45.000
do you think we can ever really create
link |
01:04:48.320
a test for consciousness?
link |
01:04:49.440
Because it feels like we're very human centric,
link |
01:04:53.920
and so the only way we would be convinced
link |
01:04:57.600
that something is conscious is basically
link |
01:05:00.880
the thing demonstrates the illusion of consciousness,
link |
01:05:06.440
that we can never really know whether it's conscious or not,
link |
01:05:10.320
and in fact, that almost feels like it doesn't matter then,
link |
01:05:14.800
or does it still matter to you that something is conscious
link |
01:05:18.560
or it demonstrates consciousness?
link |
01:05:20.720
You still see that fundamental distinction.
link |
01:05:22.840
I think to a lot of people,
link |
01:05:24.880
whether a system is conscious or not
link |
01:05:27.400
matters hugely for many things,
link |
01:05:28.920
like how we treat it, can it suffer, and so on,
link |
01:05:33.080
but still, that leaves open the question,
link |
01:05:35.080
how can we ever know?
link |
01:05:36.800
And it's true that it's awfully hard
link |
01:05:38.480
to see how we can know for sure
link |
01:05:40.600
whether a system is conscious.
link |
01:05:42.360
I suspect that sociologically,
link |
01:05:44.880
the thing that's gonna convince us
link |
01:05:46.280
that a system is conscious is, in part,
link |
01:05:50.080
things like social interaction, conversation, and so on,
link |
01:05:53.880
where they seem to be conscious,
link |
01:05:56.040
they talk about their conscious states
link |
01:05:57.680
or just talk about being happy or sad
link |
01:06:00.040
or finding things meaningful or being in pain.
link |
01:06:02.800
That will tend to convince us if we don't,
link |
01:06:06.640
if a system genuinely seems to be conscious,
link |
01:06:08.360
we don't treat it as such,
link |
01:06:10.000
eventually it's gonna seem like a strange form
link |
01:06:11.960
of racism or speciesism or somehow,
link |
01:06:14.720
not to acknowledge them as conscious.
link |
01:06:16.320
I truly believe that, by the way.
link |
01:06:17.760
I believe that there is going to be
link |
01:06:21.280
something akin to the Civil Rights Movement,
link |
01:06:23.240
but for robots.
link |
01:06:25.680
I think the moment you have a Roomba say,
link |
01:06:30.000
please don't kick me, that hurts, just say it.
link |
01:06:32.840
Yeah.
link |
01:06:33.840
I think that will fundamentally change
link |
01:06:37.440
the fabric of our society.
link |
01:06:40.320
I think you're probably right,
link |
01:06:41.160
although it's gonna be very tricky
link |
01:06:42.200
because, just say we've got the technology
link |
01:06:44.920
where these conscious beings can just be created
link |
01:06:47.240
and multiplied by the thousands by flicking a switch.
link |
01:06:54.280
The legal status is gonna be different,
link |
01:06:55.920
but ultimately their moral status ought to be the same,
link |
01:06:58.100
and yeah, the civil rights issue is gonna be a huge mess.
link |
01:07:03.680
So if one day somebody clones you,
link |
01:07:06.680
another very real possibility.
link |
01:07:10.520
In fact, I find the conversation between
link |
01:07:13.760
two copies of David Chalmers quite interesting.
link |
01:07:21.400
Very thought.
link |
01:07:22.240
Who is this idiot?
link |
01:07:25.120
He's not making any sense.
link |
01:07:26.520
So what, do you think he would be conscious?
link |
01:07:32.320
I do think he would be conscious.
link |
01:07:34.480
I do think in some sense,
link |
01:07:35.760
I'm not sure it would be me,
link |
01:07:37.000
there would be two different beings at this point.
link |
01:07:39.960
I think they'd both be conscious
link |
01:07:41.240
and they both have many of the same mental properties.
link |
01:07:45.800
I think they both in a way have the same moral status.
link |
01:07:49.400
It'd be wrong to hurt either of them
link |
01:07:51.560
or to kill them and so on.
link |
01:07:54.560
Still, there's some sense in which probably
link |
01:07:55.960
their legal status would have to be different.
link |
01:07:58.480
If I'm the original and that one's just a clone,
link |
01:08:01.600
then creating a clone of me,
link |
01:08:03.280
presumably the clone doesn't, for example,
link |
01:08:05.000
automatically own the stuff that I own
link |
01:08:08.600
or I've got a certain connect,
link |
01:08:14.400
the things that the people I interact with,
link |
01:08:16.400
my family, my partner and so on,
link |
01:08:19.120
I'm gonna somehow be connected to them
link |
01:08:21.120
in a way in which the clone isn't, so.
link |
01:08:24.560
Because you came slightly first?
link |
01:08:26.400
Yeah.
link |
01:08:27.240
Because a clone would argue that they have
link |
01:08:31.320
really as much of a connection.
link |
01:08:33.680
They have all the memories of that connection.
link |
01:08:35.600
Then a way you might say it's kind of unfair
link |
01:08:37.920
to discriminate against them,
link |
01:08:38.920
but say you've got an apartment
link |
01:08:40.080
that only one person can live in
link |
01:08:41.440
or a partner who only one person can be with.
link |
01:08:44.000
But why should it be you, the original?
link |
01:08:47.320
It's an interesting philosophical question,
link |
01:08:49.080
but you might say because I actually have this history,
link |
01:08:53.160
if I am the same person as the one that came before
link |
01:08:56.880
and the clone is not,
link |
01:08:58.480
then I have this history that the clone doesn't.
link |
01:09:01.000
Of course, there's also the question,
link |
01:09:03.880
isn't the clone the same person too?
link |
01:09:05.840
This is a question about personal identity.
link |
01:09:07.560
If I continue and I create a clone over there,
link |
01:09:10.720
I wanna say this one is me and this one is someone else.
link |
01:09:14.120
But you could take the view that a clone is equally me.
link |
01:09:17.960
Of course, in a movie like Star Trek
link |
01:09:20.120
where they have a teletransporter
link |
01:09:21.320
basically creates clones all the time.
link |
01:09:23.480
They treat the clones as if they're the original person.
link |
01:09:25.960
Of course, they destroy the original body in Star Trek.
link |
01:09:29.240
So there's only one left around
link |
01:09:31.000
and only very occasionally do things go wrong
link |
01:09:32.720
and you get two copies of Captain Kirk.
link |
01:09:35.840
But somehow our legal system at the very least
link |
01:09:37.800
is gonna have to sort out some of these issues
link |
01:09:40.640
and that maybe that's what's moral
link |
01:09:42.200
and what's legally acceptable are gonna come apart.
link |
01:09:47.360
What question would you ask a clone of yourself?
link |
01:09:52.160
Is there something useful you can find out from him
link |
01:09:56.120
about the fundamentals of consciousness even?
link |
01:10:00.600
I mean, kind of in principle,
link |
01:10:03.840
I know that if it's a perfect clone,
link |
01:10:06.720
it's gonna behave just like me.
link |
01:10:09.080
So I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to,
link |
01:10:11.360
I can discover whether it's a perfect clone
link |
01:10:13.160
by seeing whether it answers like me.
link |
01:10:15.240
But otherwise I know what I'm gonna find is a being
link |
01:10:18.000
which is just like me,
link |
01:10:19.440
except that it's just undergone this great shock
link |
01:10:21.960
of discovering that it's a clone.
link |
01:10:24.480
So just say you woke me up tomorrow and said,
link |
01:10:26.520
hey Dave, sorry to tell you this,
link |
01:10:29.120
but you're actually the clone
link |
01:10:31.880
and you provided me really convincing evidence,
link |
01:10:34.280
showed me the film of my being cloned
link |
01:10:36.920
and then all wrapped in here being here and waking up.
link |
01:10:41.360
So you proved to me I'm a clone,
link |
01:10:42.440
well, yeah, okay, I would find that shocking
link |
01:10:44.560
and who knows how I would react to this.
link |
01:10:46.480
So maybe by talking to the clone,
link |
01:10:48.640
I'd find something about my own psychology
link |
01:10:50.880
that I can't find out so easily,
link |
01:10:52.600
like how I'd react upon discovering that I'm a clone.
link |
01:10:55.440
I could certainly ask the clone if it's conscious
link |
01:10:57.840
and what his consciousness is like and so on,
link |
01:10:59.840
but I guess I kind of know if it's a perfect clone,
link |
01:11:02.680
it's gonna behave roughly like me.
link |
01:11:04.520
Of course, at the beginning,
link |
01:11:06.200
there'll be a question
link |
01:11:07.040
about whether a perfect clone is possible.
link |
01:11:08.880
So I may wanna ask it lots of questions
link |
01:11:11.120
to see if it's consciousness
link |
01:11:12.400
and the way it talks about its consciousness
link |
01:11:14.600
and the way it reacts to things in general is likely.
link |
01:11:17.560
And that will occupy us for a while.
link |
01:11:22.400
So basic unit testing on the early models.
link |
01:11:25.840
So if it's a perfect clone,
link |
01:11:28.520
you say that it's gonna behave exactly like you.
link |
01:11:30.760
So that takes us to free will.
link |
01:11:35.640
Is there free will?
link |
01:11:37.400
Are we able to make decisions that are not predetermined
link |
01:11:41.440
from the initial conditions of the universe?
link |
01:11:44.880
You know, philosophers do this annoying thing
link |
01:11:46.680
of saying it depends what you mean.
link |
01:11:48.720
So in this case, yeah, it really depends on what you mean,
link |
01:11:52.360
by free will.
link |
01:11:54.480
If you mean something which was not determined in advance,
link |
01:11:58.680
could never have been determined,
link |
01:12:00.560
then I don't know we have free will.
link |
01:12:02.240
I mean, there's quantum mechanics
link |
01:12:03.640
and who's to say if that opens up some room,
link |
01:12:06.160
but I'm not sure we have free will in that sense.
link |
01:12:09.560
But I'm also not sure that's the kind of free will
link |
01:12:12.280
that really matters.
link |
01:12:13.840
You know, what matters to us
link |
01:12:15.720
is being able to do what we want
link |
01:12:17.160
and to create our own futures.
link |
01:12:19.800
We've got this distinction between having our lives
link |
01:12:21.520
be under our control and under someone else's control.
link |
01:12:26.680
We've got the sense of actions that we are responsible for
link |
01:12:29.440
versus ones that we're not.
link |
01:12:31.160
I think you can make those distinctions
link |
01:12:33.760
even in a deterministic universe.
link |
01:12:36.400
And this is what people call the compatibilist view
link |
01:12:38.280
of free will, where it's compatible with determinism.
link |
01:12:41.240
So I think for many purposes,
link |
01:12:42.880
the kind of free will that matters
link |
01:12:45.520
is something we can have in a deterministic universe.
link |
01:12:48.080
And I can't see any reason in principle
link |
01:12:50.440
why an AI system couldn't have free will of that kind.
link |
01:12:54.440
If you mean super duper free will,
link |
01:12:55.840
the ability to violate the laws of physics
link |
01:12:57.720
and doing things that in principle could not be predicted.
link |
01:13:01.760
I don't know, maybe no one has that kind of free will.
link |
01:13:04.680
What's the connection between the reality of free will
link |
01:13:10.040
and the experience of it,
link |
01:13:11.400
the subjective experience in your view?
link |
01:13:15.240
So how does consciousness connect
link |
01:13:17.000
to the reality and the experience of free will?
link |
01:13:22.240
It's certainly true that when we make decisions
link |
01:13:24.800
and when we choose and so on,
link |
01:13:26.200
we feel like we have an open future.
link |
01:13:28.440
Feel like I could do this, I could go into philosophy
link |
01:13:32.440
or I could go into math, I could go to a movie tonight,
link |
01:13:36.080
I could go to a restaurant.
link |
01:13:39.280
So we experience these things as if the future is open.
link |
01:13:42.600
And maybe we experience ourselves
link |
01:13:44.520
as exerting a kind of effect on the future
link |
01:13:50.040
that somehow picking out one path
link |
01:13:51.680
from many paths were previously open.
link |
01:13:54.200
And you might think that actually
link |
01:13:56.080
if we're in a deterministic universe,
link |
01:13:58.080
there's a sense of which objectively
link |
01:13:59.880
those paths weren't really open all along,
link |
01:14:03.720
but subjectively they were open.
link |
01:14:05.800
And that's, I think that's what really matters
link |
01:14:07.320
in making a decisions where our experience
link |
01:14:09.440
of making a decision is choosing a path for ourselves.
link |
01:14:14.320
I mean, in general, our introspective models of the mind,
link |
01:14:18.120
I think are generally very distorted representations
link |
01:14:20.600
of the mind.
link |
01:14:21.600
So it may well be that our experience of ourself
link |
01:14:24.200
in making a decision, our experience of what's going on
link |
01:14:27.600
doesn't terribly well mirror what's going on.
link |
01:14:31.000
I mean, maybe there are antecedents in the brain
link |
01:14:33.160
way before anything came into consciousness
link |
01:14:37.760
and so on.
link |
01:14:39.000
Those aren't represented in our introspective model.
link |
01:14:41.720
So in general, our experience of perception,
link |
01:14:46.960
so I experience a perceptual image of the external world.
link |
01:14:50.600
It's not a terribly good model of what's actually going on
link |
01:14:53.360
in my visual cortex and so on,
link |
01:14:55.640
which has all these layers and so on.
link |
01:14:57.080
It's just one little snapshot of one bit of that.
link |
01:14:59.800
So in general, introspective models
link |
01:15:02.440
are very over oversimplified.
link |
01:15:05.240
And it wouldn't be surprising
link |
01:15:07.200
if that was true of free will as well.
link |
01:15:09.160
This also incidentally can be applied to consciousness itself.
link |
01:15:12.640
There is this very interesting view
link |
01:15:13.960
that consciousness itself is an introspective illusion.
link |
01:15:17.520
In fact, we're not conscious,
link |
01:15:19.440
but the brain just has these introspective models of itself
link |
01:15:24.280
or oversimplifies everything and represents itself
link |
01:15:27.160
as having these special properties of consciousness.
link |
01:15:31.040
It's a really simple way to kind of keep track of itself
link |
01:15:33.840
and so on.
link |
01:15:34.680
And then on the illusionist view,
link |
01:15:36.920
yeah, that's just an illusion.
link |
01:15:39.880
I find this view, when I find it implausible,
link |
01:15:42.240
I do find it very attractive in some ways,
link |
01:15:44.840
because it's easy to tell some story
link |
01:15:46.640
about how the brain would create introspective models
link |
01:15:50.120
of its own consciousness, of its own free will
link |
01:15:53.120
as a way of simplifying itself.
link |
01:15:55.480
I mean, it's a similar way when we perceive
link |
01:15:57.680
the external world, we perceive it as having these colors
link |
01:16:00.040
that maybe it doesn't really have,
link |
01:16:02.720
but of course that's a really useful way
link |
01:16:04.280
of keeping tracks, of keeping track.
link |
01:16:06.440
Did you say that you find it not very plausible?
link |
01:16:08.960
Because I find it both plausible
link |
01:16:11.880
and attractive in some sense,
link |
01:16:14.120
because I mean, that kind of view
link |
01:16:18.920
is one that has the minimum amount of mystery around it.
link |
01:16:25.040
You can kind of understand that kind of view.
link |
01:16:28.960
Everything else says we don't understand
link |
01:16:31.960
so much of this picture.
link |
01:16:33.920
No, it is very attractive, I recently wrote an article
link |
01:16:36.800
about this kind of issue called
link |
01:16:38.600
the meta problem of consciousness.
link |
01:16:41.280
The hard problem is how does a brain
link |
01:16:43.200
give you consciousness?
link |
01:16:44.200
The meta problem is why are we puzzled
link |
01:16:46.720
by the hard problem of consciousness?
link |
01:16:49.600
Because being puzzled by it,
link |
01:16:50.960
that's ultimately a bit of behavior.
link |
01:16:53.000
We might be able to explain that bit of behavior
link |
01:16:54.880
as one of the easy problems, consciousness.
link |
01:16:57.560
So maybe there'll be some computational model
link |
01:17:00.560
that explains why we're puzzled by consciousness.
link |
01:17:03.440
The meta problem has come up with that model.
link |
01:17:05.800
And I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
link |
01:17:07.880
There's some interesting stories you can tell
link |
01:17:09.560
about why the right kind of computational system
link |
01:17:13.600
might develop these introspective models of itself
link |
01:17:17.640
that attributed itself, these special properties.
link |
01:17:21.560
So that meta problem is a research program for everyone.
link |
01:17:25.320
And then if you've got attraction
link |
01:17:27.000
to sort of simple views, desert landscapes and so on,
link |
01:17:31.320
then you can go all the way
link |
01:17:32.240
with what people call illusionism
link |
01:17:34.240
and say, in fact, consciousness itself is not real.
link |
01:17:37.760
What is real is just these introspective models
link |
01:17:42.400
we have that tell us that we're conscious.
link |
01:17:46.000
So the view is very simple, very attractive, very powerful.
link |
01:17:49.600
The trouble is, of course, it has to say
link |
01:17:51.240
that deep down, consciousness is not real.
link |
01:17:55.160
We're not actually experiencing right now.
link |
01:17:57.960
And it looks like it's just contradicting
link |
01:17:59.960
a fundamental datum of our existence.
link |
01:18:02.360
And this is why most people find this view crazy.
link |
01:18:06.080
Just as they find panpsychism crazy in one way,
link |
01:18:08.760
people find illusionism crazy in another way.
link |
01:18:13.240
But I mean, so yes, it has to deny
link |
01:18:18.000
this fundamental datum of our existence.
link |
01:18:20.640
Now, that makes the view sort of frankly unbelievable
link |
01:18:24.680
for most people.
link |
01:18:25.520
On the other hand, the view developed right
link |
01:18:28.200
might be able to explain why we find it unbelievable.
link |
01:18:31.280
Because these models are so deeply hardwired into our head.
link |
01:18:34.280
And they're all integrated.
link |
01:18:36.000
You can't escape the illusion.
link |
01:18:38.480
And it's a crazy possibility.
link |
01:18:40.720
Is it possible that the entirety of the universe,
link |
01:18:43.640
our planet, all the people in New York,
link |
01:18:46.760
all the organisms on our planet,
link |
01:18:49.800
including me here today, are not real in that sense?
link |
01:18:54.440
They're all part of an illusion inside of Dave Chalmers's head.
link |
01:18:59.800
I think all this could be a simulation.
link |
01:19:02.320
No, but not just a simulation.
link |
01:19:04.960
Because the simulation kind of is outside of you.
link |
01:19:09.200
A dream?
link |
01:19:10.120
What if it's all an illusion?
link |
01:19:12.040
Yes, a dream that you're experiencing.
link |
01:19:14.560
That's, it's all in your mind, right?
link |
01:19:18.880
Is that, can you take illusionism that far?
link |
01:19:23.040
Well, there's illusionism about the external world
link |
01:19:26.840
and illusionism about consciousness.
link |
01:19:28.440
And these might go in different.
link |
01:19:30.200
Illusionism about the external world
link |
01:19:31.800
kind of takes you back to Descartes.
link |
01:19:34.120
And yeah, could all this be produced by an evil demon?
link |
01:19:37.400
Descartes himself also had the dream argument.
link |
01:19:39.560
He said, how do you know you're not dreaming right now?
link |
01:19:42.040
How do you know this is not an amazing dream?
link |
01:19:43.720
And it's at least a possibility that yeah,
link |
01:19:46.320
this could be some super duper complex dream
link |
01:19:49.840
in the next universe up.
link |
01:19:51.640
I guess though, my attitude is that just as,
link |
01:19:57.200
when Descartes thought that if the evil demon was doing it,
link |
01:20:00.520
it's not real.
link |
01:20:01.440
A lot of people these days say if a simulation is doing it,
link |
01:20:04.360
it's not real.
link |
01:20:05.560
As I was saying before, I think even if it's a simulation,
link |
01:20:08.040
that doesn't stop this from being real.
link |
01:20:09.400
It just tells us what the world is made of.
link |
01:20:11.440
Likewise, if it's a dream,
link |
01:20:12.960
it could turn out that all this is like my dream
link |
01:20:15.840
created by my brain in the next universe up.
link |
01:20:19.080
My own view is that wouldn't stop this physical world
link |
01:20:21.920
from being real.
link |
01:20:22.760
It would turn out this cup at the most fundamental level
link |
01:20:26.040
was made of a bit of say my consciousness
link |
01:20:28.880
in the dreaming mind at the next level up.
link |
01:20:31.920
Maybe that would give you a kind of weird kind of panpsychism
link |
01:20:35.400
about reality, but it wouldn't show that the cup isn't real.
link |
01:20:39.360
It would just tell us it's ultimately made of processes
link |
01:20:42.120
in my dreaming mind.
link |
01:20:43.200
So I'd resist the idea that if the physical world is a dream,
link |
01:20:48.200
then it's an illusion.
link |
01:20:50.640
That's right.
link |
01:20:52.200
By the way, perhaps you have an interesting thought
link |
01:20:54.960
about it.
link |
01:20:55.800
Why is Descartes demon or genius considered evil?
link |
01:21:02.200
Why couldn't have been a benevolent one
link |
01:21:04.560
that had the same powers?
link |
01:21:05.840
Yeah, I mean, Descartes called it the malign genie,
link |
01:21:08.800
the evil genie or evil genius.
link |
01:21:12.240
Malign, I guess was the word.
link |
01:21:14.280
But yeah, it's an interesting question.
link |
01:21:15.880
I mean, a later philosophy, Barclay said,
link |
01:21:20.600
no, in fact, all this is done by God.
link |
01:21:25.400
God actually supplies you all of these perceptions
link |
01:21:30.400
and ideas and that's how physical reality is sustained.
link |
01:21:33.880
And interestingly, Barclay's God is doing something
link |
01:21:36.840
that doesn't look so different
link |
01:21:38.160
from what Descartes evil demon was doing.
link |
01:21:41.200
It's just that Descartes thought it was deception
link |
01:21:43.560
and Barclay thought it was not.
link |
01:21:46.240
And I'm actually more sympathetic to Barclay here.
link |
01:21:51.000
Yeah, this evil demon may be trying to deceive you,
link |
01:21:54.800
but I think, okay, well, the evil demon
link |
01:21:56.800
may just be working under a false philosophical theory.
link |
01:22:01.200
It thinks it's deceiving you, it's wrong.
link |
01:22:02.800
It's like there's machines in the matrix.
link |
01:22:04.200
They thought they were deceiving you
link |
01:22:06.120
that all this stuff is real.
link |
01:22:07.040
I think, no, if we're in a matrix, it's all still real.
link |
01:22:11.600
Yeah, the philosopher O.K. Bousma had a nice story
link |
01:22:15.080
about this about 50 years ago, about Descartes evil demon,
link |
01:22:19.000
where he said this demon spends all its time
link |
01:22:21.600
trying to fool people, but fails
link |
01:22:24.560
because somehow all the demon ends up doing
link |
01:22:26.600
is constructing realities for people.
link |
01:22:30.160
So yeah, I think that maybe it's a very natural
link |
01:22:33.000
to take this view that if we're in a simulation
link |
01:22:35.040
or evil demon scenario or something,
link |
01:22:38.560
then none of this is real.
link |
01:22:40.640
But I think it may be ultimately a philosophical mistake,
link |
01:22:43.760
especially if you take on board sort of the view of reality
link |
01:22:46.640
where what matters to reality is really its structure,
link |
01:22:50.000
something like its mathematical structure and so on,
link |
01:22:52.800
which seems to be the view that a lot of people take
link |
01:22:54.600
from contemporary physics.
link |
01:22:56.360
And it looks like you can find
link |
01:22:57.960
all that mathematical structure in a simulation,
link |
01:23:01.320
maybe even in a dream and so on.
link |
01:23:03.520
So as long as that structure is real,
link |
01:23:05.400
I would say that's enough for the physical world to be real.
link |
01:23:08.640
Yeah, the physical world may turn out
link |
01:23:10.040
to be somewhat more intangible than we had thought
link |
01:23:13.120
and have a surprising nature of it.
link |
01:23:15.240
We're already gotten very used to that from modern science.
link |
01:23:19.560
See, you've kind of alluded
link |
01:23:21.120
that you don't have to have consciousness
link |
01:23:23.160
for high levels of intelligence,
link |
01:23:25.440
but to create truly general intelligence systems,
link |
01:23:29.840
AGI systems at human level intelligence
link |
01:23:32.320
and perhaps super human level intelligence,
link |
01:23:34.960
you've talked about that you feel like
link |
01:23:37.040
that kind of thing might be very far away,
link |
01:23:38.960
but nevertheless, when we reached that point,
link |
01:23:43.440
do you think consciousness
link |
01:23:46.040
from an engineering perspective is needed
link |
01:23:49.440
or at least highly beneficial for creating an AGI system?
link |
01:23:54.440
Yeah, no one knows what consciousness is for functionally.
link |
01:23:57.680
So right now there's no specific thing we can point to
link |
01:24:00.880
and say, you need consciousness for that.
link |
01:24:05.160
So my inclination is to believe
link |
01:24:06.560
that in principle AGI is possible.
link |
01:24:09.320
The very least I don't see why
link |
01:24:11.240
someone couldn't simulate a brain,
link |
01:24:13.240
ultimately have a computational system
link |
01:24:16.120
that produces all of our behavior.
link |
01:24:18.240
And if that's possible,
link |
01:24:19.440
I'm sure vastly many other computational systems
link |
01:24:22.800
of equal or greater sophistication are possible
link |
01:24:27.160
with all of our cognitive functions and more.
link |
01:24:29.400
My inclination is to think that
link |
01:24:32.280
once you've got all these cognitive functions,
link |
01:24:35.400
perception, attention, reasoning,
link |
01:24:39.720
introspection, language, emotion, and so on,
link |
01:24:44.440
it's very likely you'll have consciousness as well.
link |
01:24:49.160
So at least it's very hard for me to see
link |
01:24:50.600
how you'd have a system that had all those things
link |
01:24:52.720
while bypassing somehow conscious.
link |
01:24:55.640
So just naturally it's integrated quite naturally.
link |
01:25:00.160
There's a lot of overlap about the kind of function
link |
01:25:02.960
that required to achieve each of those things
link |
01:25:04.840
that's, so you can't disentangle them
link |
01:25:07.640
even when you're recreating.
link |
01:25:08.480
It seems to, at least in us,
link |
01:25:09.680
but we don't know what the causal role of consciousness
link |
01:25:13.320
in the physical world, what it does.
link |
01:25:14.600
I mean, just say it turns out
link |
01:25:15.960
consciousness does something very specific
link |
01:25:17.720
in the physical world like collapsing wave functions
link |
01:25:20.560
as on one common interpretation of quantum mechanics.
link |
01:25:24.240
Then ultimately we might find some place
link |
01:25:25.680
where it actually makes a difference
link |
01:25:27.560
and we could say, ah,
link |
01:25:28.680
here is where in collapsing wave functions
link |
01:25:30.520
it's driving the behavior of a system.
link |
01:25:32.760
And maybe it could even turn out that for AGI,
link |
01:25:37.080
you'd need something playing that.
link |
01:25:39.200
I mean, if you wanted to connect this to free will,
link |
01:25:41.200
some people think consciousness collapsing wave functions,
link |
01:25:43.520
that would be how the conscious mind exerts effect
link |
01:25:47.640
on the physical world and exerts its free will.
link |
01:25:50.440
And maybe it could turn out that any AGI
link |
01:25:53.520
that didn't utilize that mechanism would be limited
link |
01:25:56.680
in the kinds of functionality that it had.
link |
01:25:59.760
I don't myself find that plausible.
link |
01:26:02.240
I think probably that functionality could be simulated.
link |
01:26:05.000
But you can imagine once we had a very specific idea
link |
01:26:07.760
about the role of consciousness in the physical world,
link |
01:26:10.440
this would have some impact on the capacity of AGI's.
link |
01:26:14.080
And if it was a role that could not be duplicated elsewhere,
link |
01:26:17.880
then we'd have to find some way to either
link |
01:26:22.560
get consciousness in the system to play that role
link |
01:26:24.640
or to simulate it.
link |
01:26:25.520
If we can isolate a particular role to consciousness,
link |
01:26:29.080
of course, it seems like an incredibly difficult thing.
link |
01:26:35.120
Do you have worries about existential threats
link |
01:26:39.600
of conscious intelligent beings that are not us?
link |
01:26:46.240
So certainly, I'm sure you're worried about us
link |
01:26:50.640
from an existential threat perspective,
link |
01:26:52.840
but outside of us, AI systems.
link |
01:26:55.400
There's a couple of different kinds
link |
01:26:56.440
of existential threats here.
link |
01:26:58.160
One is an existential threat to consciousness generally.
link |
01:27:01.400
I mean, yes, I care about humans
link |
01:27:04.000
and the survival of humans and so on,
link |
01:27:05.960
but just say it turns out that eventually we're replaced
link |
01:27:10.360
by some artificial beings that aren't humans,
link |
01:27:12.680
but are somehow our successors.
link |
01:27:15.480
They still have good lives.
link |
01:27:16.800
They still do interesting and wonderful things
link |
01:27:19.200
with the universe.
link |
01:27:20.600
I don't think that's not so bad.
link |
01:27:23.440
That's just our successors.
link |
01:27:24.560
We were one stage in evolution.
link |
01:27:26.480
Something different, maybe better came next.
link |
01:27:29.720
If on the other hand, all of consciousness was wiped out,
link |
01:27:33.280
that would be a very serious moral disaster.
link |
01:27:36.760
One way that could happen is by all intelligent life
link |
01:27:40.880
being wiped out.
link |
01:27:42.080
And many people think that, yeah,
link |
01:27:43.320
once you get to humans and AIs and amazing sophistication
link |
01:27:47.680
where everyone has got the ability to create weapons
link |
01:27:51.000
that can destroy the whole universe just by pressing a button,
link |
01:27:55.560
then maybe it's inevitable all intelligent life will die out.
link |
01:28:00.640
That would certainly be a disaster.
link |
01:28:03.720
And we've got to think very hard about how to avoid that.
link |
01:28:06.040
But yeah, another interesting kind of disaster
link |
01:28:08.040
is that maybe intelligent life is not wiped out,
link |
01:28:12.160
but all consciousness is wiped out.
link |
01:28:14.920
So just say your thought,
link |
01:28:16.480
unlike what I was saying a moment ago,
link |
01:28:18.000
that there are two different kinds of intelligent systems,
link |
01:28:21.400
some which are conscious and some which are not.
link |
01:28:25.400
And just say it turns out that we create AGI
link |
01:28:28.840
with a high degree of intelligence,
link |
01:28:30.800
meaning high degree of sophistication and its behavior,
link |
01:28:34.080
but with no consciousness at all.
link |
01:28:37.080
That AGI could take over the world maybe,
link |
01:28:39.680
but then there'd be no consciousness in this world.
link |
01:28:42.760
This would be a world of zombies.
link |
01:28:44.400
Some people have called this the zombie apocalypse
link |
01:28:48.160
because it's an apocalypse for consciousness.
link |
01:28:50.240
Consciousness is gone.
link |
01:28:51.200
You've merely got this super intelligent,
link |
01:28:53.120
nonconscious robots.
link |
01:28:54.560
And I would say that's a moral disaster in the same way,
link |
01:28:58.040
in almost the same way that the world
link |
01:28:59.840
with no intelligent life is a moral disaster.
link |
01:29:02.240
All value and meaning may be gone from that world.
link |
01:29:06.720
So these are both threats to watch out for.
link |
01:29:09.000
Now, my own view is if you get super intelligence,
link |
01:29:11.720
you're almost certainly gonna bring consciousness with it.
link |
01:29:13.720
So I hope that's not gonna happen.
link |
01:29:15.840
But of course, I don't understand consciousness.
link |
01:29:18.400
No one understands consciousness.
link |
01:29:20.240
This is one reason for,
link |
01:29:21.680
this is one reason at least among many
link |
01:29:23.400
for thinking very seriously about consciousness
link |
01:29:25.520
and thinking about the kind of future
link |
01:29:27.960
we want to create in a world with humans and or AIs.
link |
01:29:33.160
How do you feel about the possibility
link |
01:29:35.760
if consciousness so naturally does come with AGI systems
link |
01:29:39.920
that we are just a step in the evolution?
link |
01:29:42.600
That we will be just something, a blimp on the record
link |
01:29:47.240
that'll be studied in books
link |
01:29:49.040
by the AGI systems centuries from now?
link |
01:29:51.720
I mean, I think I'd probably be okay with that,
link |
01:29:55.400
especially if somehow humans are continuous with AGI.
link |
01:29:58.480
I mean, I think something like this is inevitable.
link |
01:30:01.560
The very least humans are gonna be transformed.
link |
01:30:03.960
We're gonna be augmented by technology.
link |
01:30:06.480
It's already happening in all kinds of ways.
link |
01:30:08.840
We're gonna be transformed by technology
link |
01:30:11.520
where our brains are gonna be uploaded
link |
01:30:13.160
and computationally enhanced.
link |
01:30:15.880
And eventually that line between what's a human
link |
01:30:18.040
and what's an AI may be kind of hard to draw.
link |
01:30:23.400
How much does it matter, for example,
link |
01:30:24.800
that some future being a thousand years from now
link |
01:30:28.680
that somehow descended from us actually still has biology?
link |
01:30:32.120
I think it would be nice if you kind of point
link |
01:30:34.200
to its cognitive system, point to some parts
link |
01:30:36.160
that had some roots in us and trace a continuous line there.
link |
01:30:40.840
That would be selfishly nice for me to think that,
link |
01:30:43.720
okay, I'm connected to this thread line
link |
01:30:46.480
through the future of the world,
link |
01:30:48.120
but if it turns out, okay, there's a jump there.
link |
01:30:50.600
They found a better way to design cognitive systems.
link |
01:30:53.760
They designed a wholly new kind of thing.
link |
01:30:55.440
And the only line is some causal chain of designing
link |
01:30:59.800
and systems that design better systems.
link |
01:31:03.120
Is that so much worse?
link |
01:31:04.800
I don't know.
link |
01:31:05.640
We're still at least part of a causal chain of design.
link |
01:31:08.360
And yes, they're not humans,
link |
01:31:09.560
but still they're our successes.
link |
01:31:11.640
So, I mean, ultimately I think it's probably inevitable
link |
01:31:14.440
that something like that will happen.
link |
01:31:16.760
And at least we were part of the process.
link |
01:31:19.920
It'd be nice if they still cared enough about us
link |
01:31:23.400
to maybe to engage with our arguments.
link |
01:31:28.240
I'm really hoping that the AGI's are gonna solve
link |
01:31:30.080
all the problems of philosophy.
link |
01:31:31.760
They'll come back and read all this crappy work
link |
01:31:35.040
for the 20th and 21st century,
link |
01:31:36.480
hard problem of consciousness.
link |
01:31:37.680
And here is why they got it wrong.
link |
01:31:39.960
And so, and if that happened,
link |
01:31:41.000
then I'd really feel like I was part of
link |
01:31:42.360
at least an intellectual process over centuries.
link |
01:31:44.960
And that would be kind of cool.
link |
01:31:45.960
Well, I'm pretty sure they would clone
link |
01:31:48.520
or they would recreate David Chalmers
link |
01:31:50.960
and for the fun of it,
link |
01:31:52.480
sort of bring back other philosophers.
link |
01:31:55.160
Yeah, bring back Descartes.
link |
01:31:56.200
Descartes and just put them in a room and just watch.
link |
01:31:58.800
It'll be a Netflix of the future show
link |
01:32:02.040
where you bring philosophers from different human,
link |
01:32:04.600
100% human philosophers from previous generations,
link |
01:32:07.680
put them in a room and see them.
link |
01:32:09.440
I am totally up for that.
link |
01:32:11.160
Simulators, AGI's of the future,
link |
01:32:14.040
if you're watching this podcast, do that.
link |
01:32:17.680
I would like to be recreated and ending out with Descartes.
link |
01:32:20.880
Where Descartes would be the first,
link |
01:32:22.640
if you could hang out as part of such a TV show
link |
01:32:26.120
with a philosopher that's no longer with us from long ago,
link |
01:32:30.880
who would you choose?
link |
01:32:33.200
Descartes would have to be right up there.
link |
01:32:34.760
Oh, actually a couple of months ago,
link |
01:32:36.840
I got to have a conversation with Descartes,
link |
01:32:39.000
an actor who's actually a philosopher
link |
01:32:40.760
came out on stage playing Descartes.
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01:32:42.800
I didn't know this was gonna happen.
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01:32:43.880
And I just after I gave a talk
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01:32:46.200
and told me about how my ideas were crap
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01:32:50.120
and all derived from him.
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01:32:51.560
And so we had a long argument.
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01:32:53.440
This was great.
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01:32:54.680
I would love to see what Descartes would think about AI,
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01:32:57.400
for example, and the modern neuroscience.
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01:32:59.520
And so I suspect not too much would surprise him,
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01:33:01.800
but yeah, William James,
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01:33:07.120
for a psychologist of consciousness,
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01:33:08.720
I think James was probably the richest.
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01:33:14.000
But, oh, there are Immanuel Kant.
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01:33:17.120
I never really understood what he was up to
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01:33:19.120
if I got to actually talk to him about some of this.
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01:33:22.760
Hey, there was Princess Elizabeth who talked with Descartes
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01:33:25.720
and who really got at the problems
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01:33:28.760
of how Descartes ideas of a nonphysical mind
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01:33:32.800
interacting with the physical body couldn't really work.
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01:33:37.240
She's been kind of, most philosophers
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01:33:39.040
think she's been proved right.
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01:33:40.040
So maybe put me in a room with Descartes
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01:33:42.560
and Princess Elizabeth and we can all argue it out.
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01:33:47.840
What kind of future?
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01:33:49.360
So we talked about zombies, a concerning future,
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01:33:53.280
but what kind of future excites you?
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01:33:56.180
What do you think if we look forward sort of,
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01:34:00.480
we're at the very early stages
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01:34:02.160
of understanding consciousness.
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01:34:04.080
And we're now at the early stages
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01:34:05.840
of being able to engineer complex, interesting systems
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01:34:10.120
that have degrees of intelligence.
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01:34:11.560
And maybe one day we'll have degrees of consciousness,
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01:34:14.240
maybe be able to upload brains,
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01:34:17.120
all those possibilities, virtual reality.
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01:34:20.000
Is there a particular aspect to this future world
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01:34:22.640
that just excites you?
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01:34:24.880
Well, I think there are lots of different aspects.
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01:34:26.360
I mean, frankly, I want it to hurry up and happen.
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01:34:29.480
It's like, yeah, we've had some progress lately in AI and VR,
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01:34:33.120
but in the grand scheme of things, it's still kind of slow.
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01:34:35.960
The changes are not yet transformative.
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01:34:38.200
And I'm in my fifties, I've only got so long left.
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01:34:42.080
I'd like to see really serious AI in my lifetime
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01:34:45.640
and really serious virtual worlds.
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01:34:48.240
Cause yeah, once people,
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01:34:49.680
I would like to be able to hang out in a virtual reality,
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01:34:52.040
which is richer than this reality
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01:34:56.520
to really get to inhabit fundamentally different kinds
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01:35:00.320
of spaces.
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01:35:02.160
Well, I would very much like to be able to upload
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01:35:05.000
my mind onto a computer.
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01:35:07.680
So maybe I don't have to die.
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01:35:11.440
If this is maybe gradually replaced my neurons
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01:35:14.200
with a Silicon chips and inhabit a computer.
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01:35:17.360
Selfishly, that would be wonderful.
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01:35:19.320
I suspect I'm not gonna quite get there in my lifetime,
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01:35:24.400
but once that's possible,
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01:35:26.520
then you've got the possibility of transforming
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01:35:28.000
your consciousness in remarkable ways,
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01:35:30.200
augmenting it, enhancing it.
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01:35:33.280
So let me ask then,
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01:35:34.440
if such a system is a possibility within your lifetime
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01:35:39.560
and you were given the opportunity to become immortal
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01:35:44.200
in this kind of way, would you choose to be immortal?
link |
01:35:50.800
Yes, I totally would.
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01:35:52.400
I know some people say they couldn't,
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01:35:54.880
it'd be awful to be immortal, be so boring or something.
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01:35:59.800
I don't see, I really don't see why this might be.
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01:36:04.800
I mean, even if it's just ordinary life that continues,
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01:36:07.200
ordinary life is not so bad.
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01:36:09.520
But furthermore, I kind of suspect that,
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01:36:12.840
if the universe is gonna go on forever or indefinitely,
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01:36:16.120
it's gonna continue to be interesting.
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01:36:19.240
I don't think your view was that we just have to get
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01:36:22.120
this one romantic point of interest now
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01:36:24.160
and afterwards it's all gonna be boring,
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01:36:26.160
super intelligent stasis.
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01:36:28.440
I guess my vision is more like,
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01:36:30.000
no, it's gonna continue to be infinitely interesting.
link |
01:36:32.640
Something like as you go up the set theoretic hierarchy,
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01:36:36.120
you go from the finite cardinals to Aleph zero
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01:36:42.520
and then through there to all the Aleph one and Aleph two
link |
01:36:46.000
and maybe the continuum and you keep taking power sets
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01:36:49.840
and in set theory, they've got these results
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01:36:51.920
that actually all this is fundamentally unpredictable.
link |
01:36:54.760
It doesn't follow any simple computational patterns.
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01:36:57.360
There's new levels of creativity
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01:36:58.920
as the set theoretic universe expands and expands.
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01:37:01.880
I guess that's my future.
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01:37:03.320
That's my vision of the future.
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01:37:04.840
That's my optimistic vision
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01:37:06.000
of the future of super intelligence.
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01:37:08.040
It will keep expanding and keep growing,
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01:37:09.760
but still being fundamentally unpredictable at many points.
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01:37:12.880
I mean, yes, this creates all kinds of worries
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01:37:15.280
like couldn't all be fragile and be destroyed at any point.
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01:37:18.960
So we're gonna need a solution to that problem.
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01:37:21.160
But if we get to stipulate that I'm immortal,
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01:37:23.360
well, I hope that I'm not just immortal and stuck
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01:37:25.960
in the single world forever,
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01:37:27.880
but I'm immortal and get to take part in this process
link |
01:37:30.960
of going through infinitely rich, created futures.
link |
01:37:34.560
Rich, unpredictable, exciting.
link |
01:37:36.480
Well, I think I speak for a lot of people in saying,
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01:37:39.880
I hope you do become immortal and there'll be
link |
01:37:41.840
that Netflix show, The Future,
link |
01:37:43.680
where you get to argue with Descartes,
link |
01:37:47.480
perhaps for all eternity.
link |
01:37:49.800
So David, it was an honor.
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01:37:51.480
Thank you so much for talking today.
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01:37:52.920
Thanks, it was a pleasure.
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01:37:55.040
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
01:37:57.160
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link |
01:38:00.040
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01:38:02.680
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link |
01:38:05.440
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01:38:08.680
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01:38:12.120
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01:38:14.920
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01:38:16.760
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01:38:19.200
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link |
01:38:23.120
And now let me leave you with some words
link |
01:38:24.960
from David Chalmers.
link |
01:38:26.960
Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world,
link |
01:38:30.760
but to account for consciousness,
link |
01:38:32.240
we have to go beyond the resources it provides.
link |
01:38:35.240
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.