The following is a conversation with David Chalmers.

He's a philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind,

philosophy of language, and consciousness.

He's perhaps best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness,

which could be stated as,

Why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?

Consciousness is almost entirely a mystery.

Many people who worry about AI safety and ethics believe that, in some form,

consciousness can and should be engineered into AI systems of the future.

So while there's much mystery, disagreement, and discoveries yet to be made about consciousness,

these conversations, while fundamentally philosophical in nature,

may nevertheless be very important for engineers of modern AI systems to engage in.

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And now, here's my conversation with David Chalmers.

Do you think we're living in a simulation?

I don't rule it out.

There's probably going to be a lot of simulations in the history of the cosmos.

If the simulation is designed well enough,

it'll be indistinguishable from a non simulated reality.

And although we could keep searching for evidence that were not in a simulation,

any of that evidence in principle could be simulated.

So I think it's a possibility.

But do you think the thought experiment is interesting or useful

to calibrate how we think about the nature of reality?

Yeah, I definitely think it's interesting and useful.

In fact, I'm actually writing a book about this right now all about the simulation idea,

using it to shed light on a whole bunch of philosophical questions.

So the big one is, how do we know anything about the external world?

Descartes said, maybe you're being fooled by an evil demon

who's stimulating your brain and thinking, all this stuff is real when, in fact, it's all made up.

Well, the modern version of that is, how do you know you're not in a simulation?

And then the thought is, if you're in a simulation, none of this is real.

So that's teaching you something about knowledge.

How do you know about the external world?

I think there's also really interesting questions about the nature of reality

right here.

If we are in a simulation, is all this real?

Is there really a table here?

Is it really a microphone?

Do I really have a body?

The standard view would be, no, we don't.

None of this would be real.

My view is actually that's wrong.

And even if we are in a simulation, all of this is real.

That's why I call this reality 2.0.

New version of reality, different version of reality, still reality.

So what's the difference between quote unquote real world and the world that we perceive?

So we interact with the world by perceiving it.

It only really exists through the window of our perception system and in our mind.

So what's the difference between something that's quote unquote real that exists

perhaps without us being there and the world as you perceive it?

Well, the world as we perceive it is a very simplified and distorted

version of what's going on underneath.

We already know that from just thinking about science.

You don't see too many obviously quantum mechanical effects and what we perceive,

but we still know quantum mechanics is going on under all things.

We like to think the world we perceive is this very kind of simplified picture of colors and

shapes existing and in space and so on.

We know that's what the philosopher Wilfred Sellers called the manifest image.

The world as it seems to us.

We already know underneath all that is a very different scientific image with atoms

or quantum wave functions or super strings or whatever the latest thing is.

And that's the ultimate scientific reality.

So I think of the simulation idea as basically another hypothesis about what the ultimate

say quasi scientific or a metaphysical reality is going on underneath the world

or the manifest image.

The world of the manifest image is this very simple thing that we interact with.

It's neutral on the underlying stuff of reality science can help tell us about that.

Maybe philosophy can help tell us about that too.

And if we eventually take the red pill and find out we're in a simulation,

my view is that's just another view about what reality is made of.

The philosopher Emmanuel Kant said, what is the nature of the thing in itself?

I've got a glass here and it's got all these.

It appears to me a certain way, a certain shape, it's liquid, it's clear.

He said, what is the nature of the thing in itself?

Well, I think of the simulation idea.

It's a hypothesis about the nature of the thing in itself.

It turns out if we're in a simulation, the thing in itself, nature of this glass,

okay, it's actually a bunch of data structures running on a computer in the next universe up.

Yeah, that's what people tend to do when they think about simulation.

They think about our modern computers and somehow trivially, crudely just scaled up in some sense.

But in order to actually simulate something as complicated as our universe that's

made up of molecules and atoms and particles and quarks and maybe even strings,

all of that requires something just infinitely many orders of magnitude more of scale and complexity.

Do you think we're even able to even conceptualize what it would take to simulate our universe?

Or does it just slip into this idea that you basically have to build a universe,

something so big to simulate it?

Does it get into this fuzzy area that's not useful at all?

Yeah, I mean, our universe is obviously incredibly

complicated and for us within our universe to build a simulation of a universe as complicated as ours

is going to have obvious problems here.

If universe is finite, there's just no way that's going to work.

Maybe there's some cute way to make it work if the universe is infinite.

Maybe an infinite universe could somehow simulate a copy of itself.

But that's going to be hard.

Nonetheless, just that we are in a simulation, I think there's no particular reason why we have

to think the simulating universe has to be anything like ours.

You've said before that it might be...

So you could think of turtles all the way down.

You could think of the simulating universe different than ours,

but we ourselves could also create another simulating universe.

So you said that there could be these levels of universes.

And you've also mentioned this hilarious idea.

Maybe you're talking in cheek, maybe not, that there may be simulations within simulations,

arbitrarily stacked levels, and that we may be in level 42 along those stacks,

referencing H. Hacker's guide to the universe.

If we're indeed in a simulation within a simulation at level 42,

what do you think level zero looks like?

I would expect that level zero is truly enormous.

I mean, not just if it's finite at some extraordinarily large finite capacity,

much more likely it's infinite.

Maybe it's got some very high set theoretic cardinalities that enables it

to support just any number of simulations.

So high degree of infinity at level zero,

slightly smaller degree of infinity at level one.

So by the time you get down to us at level 42,

maybe there's plenty of room for lots of simulations of finite capacity.

If the top universe is only a small finite capacity,

then obviously that's going to put very, very serious limits

on how many simulations you're going to be able to be able to get running.

So I think we can certainly confidently say that if we're at level 42,

then the top level is pretty damn big.

So it gets more and more constrained as we get down levels,

more and more simplified and constrained and limited in resources.

Yeah, we still have plenty of capacity here.

What was it, Feynman said?

He said there's plenty of room at the bottom.

We're still a number of levels above the degree

where there's room for fundamental computing, physical computing capacity,

quantum computing capacity at the bottom level.

So we got plenty of room to play with and make.

We probably have plenty of room for simulations of pretty sophisticated universes,

perhaps none as complicated as our universe,

unless our universe is infinite,

but still at the very least for pretty serious finite universes,

but maybe universes somewhat simpler than ours,

unless of course we're prepared to take certain shortcuts in the simulation,

which might then increase the capacity significantly.

Do you think the human mind, us people,

in terms of the complexity of simulation is at the height

of what the simulation may be able to achieve?

Like if you look at incredible entities that could be created in this universe of ours,

do you have an intuition about how incredible human beings are on that scale?

I think we're pretty impressive, but we're not that impressive.

Are we above average?

I mean, I think kind of human beings are at a certain point

in the scale of intelligence, which made many things possible.

You get through evolution, through single cell organisms,

through fish and mammals and primates,

and something happens once you get to human beings.

We've just reached that level where we get to develop language,

we get to develop certain kinds of culture,

and we get to develop certain kinds of collective thinking

that has enabled all this amazing stuff to happen,

science and literature and engineering and culture and so on.

Still, we're just at the beginning of that on the evolutionary threshold.

It's kind of like we just got there, who knows,

a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago.

So we're probably just at the very beginning for what's possible there.

So I'm inclined to think among the scale of intelligent beings

where somewhere very near the bottom.

I would expect that, for example, if we're in a simulation,

then the simulators who created us have got the capacity

to be far more sophisticated.

For a level 42, who knows what the ones at level zero are like?

It's also possible that this is the epitome of what is possible to achieve.

So we assume a being see ourselves maybe as flawed,

see all the constraints, all the limitations,

but maybe that's the magical, the beautiful thing.

Maybe those limitations are the essential elements

for an interesting sort of that edge of chaos, that interesting existence,

that if you make us much more intelligent,

if you make us more powerful in any kind of dimension of performance,

maybe you lose something fundamental that makes life worth living.

So you kind of have this optimistic view that we're this little baby

and there's so much growth and potential, but this could also be it.

This is the most amazing thing is us.

Maybe what you're saying is consistent with what I'm saying.

I mean, we still have levels of intelligence far beyond us,

but maybe those levels of intelligence on your view would be kind of boring.

And we kind of get so good at everything that life suddenly becomes unidimensional.

So we're just inhabiting this one spot of like maximal romanticism

in the history of evolution.

You get to humans and it's like, yeah, and years to come,

our super intelligent descendants are going to look back at us

and say those were the days when they just hit the point of inflection and life was interesting.

I am an optimist.

So I'd like to think that if there is super intelligent somewhere in the future,

they'll figure out how to make life super interesting and super romantic.

Well, you know what they're going to do.

So what they're going to do is they realize how boring life is when you're super intelligent.

So they create a new level of assimilation

and sort of live through the things they've created by watching them stumble about in their flawed ways.

So maybe that's, so you create a new level of assimilation every time you get really bored

with how smart and this would be kind of sad though,

because we showed the peak of their existence would be like watching simulations for entertainment.

I'm like saying the peak of our existence now is Netflix.

No, it's all right.

A flip side of that could be the peak of our existence

for many people having children and watching them grow.

That becomes very meaningful.

Okay.

You create a simulation that's like creating a family.

Creating like, well, any kind of creation is kind of a powerful act.

Do you think it's easier to simulate the mind or the universe?

So I've heard several people, including Nick Bossram,

think about ideas of, you know, maybe you don't need to simulate the universe.

You can just simulate the human mind or in general,

just the distinction between simulating the entirety of it,

the entirety of the physical world or just simulating the mind.

Which one do you see is more challenging?

Well, I think in some sense, the answer is obvious.

It has to be simpler to simulate the mind than to simulate the universe

because the mind is part of the universe.

In order to fully simulate the universe, you're going to have to simulate the mind.

So unless we're talking about partial simulations.

And I guess the question is, which comes first?

Does the mind come before the universe or does the universe come before the mind?

So the mind could just be an emergent phenomena in this universe.

So simulation is a, is an interesting thing that, you know, it's,

it's not like creating a simulation perhaps requires you to program every single thing

that happens in it.

It's just defining a set of initial conditions and rules based on which it behaves.

Similarly, the mind requires you to have a little bit more.

We're now in a little bit of a crazy lamp, but it requires you to understand

the fundamentals of cognition, perhaps of consciousness,

of perception of everything like that.

That's me, that's not created through some kind of emergence from basic physics laws,

but more requires you to actually understand the fundamentals of the mind.

How about if we said to simulate the brain rather than the mind?

The brain is just a big physical system.

The universe is a giant physical system to simulate the universe.

At the very least, you're going to have to simulate the brains as well as all the other

physical systems within it. And, you know, it's not obvious there's

that the problems are any worse for the brain than for, it's a particularly complex

physical system.

But if we can simulate arbitrary physical systems, we can simulate brains.

There is this further question of whether when you simulate a brain,

will that bring along all the features of the mind with it?

Like will you get consciousness?

Will you get thinking?

Will you get free will and so on?

And that's something philosophers have argued over for years.

My own view is if you simulate the brain well enough, that will also simulate the mind.

But yeah, there's plenty of people who would say, no, you'd merely get a zombie system,

a simulation of a brain without any true consciousness.

But for you, you put together a brain, the consciousness comes with it, a rise.

Yeah, I don't think it's obvious.

That's your intuition.

My view is roughly that, yeah, what is responsible for consciousness?

It's in the patterns of information processing and so on, rather than say the biology that

it's made of.

There's certainly plenty of people out there who think consciousness has to be, say, biological.

So if you merely replicate the patterns of information processing in a non biological

substrate, you'll miss what's crucial for consciousness.

I mean, I think just don't think there's any particular reason to think that biology is

special here, you can imagine substituting the biology for non biological systems,

say silicon circuits that play the same role.

The behavior will continue to be the same.

And I think just to keep out, what is the true, when I think about the connection,

the isomorphisms between consciousness and the brain, the deepest connections to me

seem to connect consciousness to patterns of information processing, not to specific biology.

So I at least adopted as my working hypothesis that basically it's the computation and the

information that matters for consciousness.

At the same time, we don't understand consciousness or this could be wrong.

So the computation, the flow, the processing, manipulation of information,

the process is where the consciousness, the software is where the consciousness comes from,

not the hardware.

Roughly the software, yeah, the patterns of information processing,

at least in the hardware, which we can view as software.

It may not be something you can just program and load and erase and so on and the way we

can with ordinary software, but it's something at the level of information

processing rather than at the level of implementation.

So on that, what do you think of the experience of self,

just the experience of the world in a virtual world, in virtual reality?

Is it possible that we can create sort of

offsprings of our consciousness by existing in a virtual world long enough?

So yeah, can we be conscious in the same kind of deep way that we are in this real world

by hanging out in a virtual world?

Yeah, well, the kind of virtual worlds we have now are interesting but limited

in certain ways.

In particular, they rely on us having a brain and so on, which is outside the virtual world.

Maybe I'll strap on my VR headset or just hang out in a virtual world on a screen,

but my brain and then my physical environment might be simulated if I'm in a virtual world.

But right now, there's no attempt to simulate my brain.

I might think there might be some non player characters in these virtual worlds that have

simulated cognitive systems of certain kinds that dictate their behavior,

but mostly they're pretty simple right now.

I mean, some people are trying to put a bit of AI in their non player characters to make them smarter.

But for now, inside virtual world, the actual thinking is interestingly distinct

from the physics of those virtual worlds.

In a way, actually, I like to think this is kind of reminiscent of the way that Descartes

thought our physical world was.

There's physics and there's the mind and they're separate.

Now, we think the mind is somehow connected to physics pretty deeply.

But in these virtual worlds, there's a physics of a virtual world.

And then there's this brain, which is totally outside the virtual world that controls it

and interacts it when anyone exercises agency in a video game.

You know, it's actually somebody outside the virtual world moving a controller,

controlling the interaction of things inside the virtual world.

So right now, in virtual worlds, the mind is somehow outside the world.

But you could imagine in the future, once we have developed serious AI,

artificial general intelligence, and so on, then we could come to virtual worlds,

which have enough sophistication, you could actually simulate a brain or have a genuine

AGI, which would then presumably be able to act in equally sophisticated ways,

maybe even more sophisticated ways inside the virtual world to how it might in the physical

world. And then the question is going to come along. That'll be kind of a VR, a virtual world

internal intelligence. And then the question is, could they have consciousness, experience,

intelligence, free will, all the things that we have. And again, my view is, I don't see why not.

To linger in it a little bit, I find virtual reality really incredibly powerful.

Just even the crude virtual reality we have now. Perhaps there's psychological effects

that make some people more amenable to virtual worlds than others. But I find myself wanting

to stay in virtual worlds for a while. With a headset or on a desktop?

No, with a headset. Really interesting because I am totally addicted to

using the internet and things on a desktop. But when it comes to VR for the headset,

I don't typically use it for more than 10 or 20 minutes. There's something just slightly

aversive about it, I find. So I don't, right now, even though I have Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest

and HTC Vive and Samsung this and that. I just don't want to stay in that world.

Not for extended periods. Do you actually find yourself hanging out?

Something about, it's both a combination of just imagination and considering the possibilities

of where this goes in the future. It feels like I want to almost prepare my brain for it.

I want to explore Disneyland when it's first being built in the early days.

It feels like walking around almost imagining the possibilities and something through that

process allows my mind to really enter into that world. But you say that the brain is external to

that virtual world. It is strictly speaking true. But if you're in VR and you do brain surgery on

an avatar and you're going to open up that skull, what are you going to find? Sorry,

nothing there. Nothing. The brain is elsewhere. You don't think it's possible to kind of separate

them. I don't mean in a sense like a hard separation, but basically, do you think it's

possible with the brain outside of the virtual Rift when you're wearing a headset,

create a new consciousness for prolonged periods of time? Really feel, really

forget that your brain is outside. This is going to be the case where the

brain is still outside. Still outside. But could living in the VR, I mean, we already find this

right with video games that are completely immersive and you get taken up by living in those

worlds and it becomes your reality for a while. So they're not completely immersive. They're just

very immersive. You don't forget the external world. Exactly. So that's what I'm asking you.

It's almost possible to really forget the external world. Really, really immerse yourself.

To forget completely, why would we forget? We've got pretty good memories. Maybe you can

stop paying attention to the external world, but this already happens a lot. I go to work

and maybe I'm not paying attention to my home life. I go to a movie and I'm immersed in that.

So that degree of immersion, absolutely. But we still have the capacity to remember it,

to completely forget the external world. I'm thinking that would probably take some,

I don't know, some pretty serious drugs or something to make your brain do that.

It's impossible. So I mean, I guess I'm getting at is consciousness truly a property that's tied

to the physical brain? Or can you create sort of different offspring copies of consciousness

is based on the worlds that you enter? Well, the way we're doing it now, at least with a standard

VR, there's just one brain interacts with the physical world, plays a video game,

puts on a video headset, interacts with this virtual world. I think we typically say there's

one consciousness here that nonetheless undergoes different environments, takes on different

characters in different environments. This is already something that happens in the non virtual

world. I might interact one way in my home life, my work life, social life, and so on. So at the

very least, that will happen in a virtual world very naturally. People sometimes adopt the character

of avatars very different from themselves, maybe even a different gender, different race, different

social background. So that much is certainly possible. I would see that as a single consciousness,

as it's taking on different personas. If you want literal splitting of consciousness into

multiple copies, I think it's going to take something more radical than that. Maybe you

can run different simulations of your brain in different realities and then expose them to

different histories. And then you'd split yourself into 10 different simulated copies,

which then undergo different environments. And then ultimately do become 10 very different

consciousnesses. Maybe that could happen. But now we're not talking about something that's possible

in the near term. We're going to have to have brain simulations and AGI for that to happen.

Got it. So before any of that happens, it's fundamentally you see it as a singular consciousness,

even though it's experiencing different environments, virtual or not, it's still connected to the same

set of memories, same set of experiences, and therefore one sort of joint conscious system.

Yeah, or at least no more multiple than the kind of multiple consciousness that we get

from inhabiting different environments in a non virtual world.

So you said as a child, you were a music color,

synesthete. Synesthete. So where songs had colors for you? So what songs had what colors?

You know, this is funny. I didn't pay much attention to this at the time, but I'd listen

to a piece of music and I'd get some kind of imagery of a kind of color. The weird thing is

mostly they were kind of murky dark greens and olive browns and the colors

weren't all that interesting. I don't know what the reason is. I mean, my theory is that maybe it's

like different chords and tones provided different colors and they all tended to get mixed together

into these somewhat uninteresting browns and greens. But every now and then,

that'd be something that had a really pure color. So this is the few that I remember. There was a

here, there and everywhere by the Beatles was bright red and has this very distinctive tonality

and it's called structure at the beginning. So that was bright red. There was this song by the

Alan Parsons project called Ammonia Avenue that was kind of a pure blue. Anyway, I've got no idea

how would this happen. I didn't even pay that much attention until it went away when I was about 20.

This synesthesia often goes away. So is it purely just the perception of a particular color or was

there a positive or negative experience like was blue associated with a positive and red with a

negative? Or is it simply the perception of color associated with some characteristic of the song?

For me, I don't remember a lot of association with emotion or with value. It was just this kind

of weird and interesting fact. I mean, at the beginning, I thought this was something that

happened to everyone, songs of colors. Maybe I mentioned it once or twice and people said,

nope. I thought it was kind of cool when there was one that had one of these especially pure

colors, but only much later, once I became grad student thinking about the mind that I read

about this phenomenon called synesthesia. And it's like, hey, that's what I had. And now I

occasionally talk about it in my classes, an intro class, and it still happens sometimes.

A student comes up and says, hey, I have that. I never knew about that. I never knew it had a name.

You said that it went away at age 20 or so. And that you have a journal entry from around

then saying, songs don't have colors anymore. What happened? What happened? Yeah, I was definitely

sad that it was gone. In retrospect, I was like, hey, that's cool. The colors have gone.

Yeah, do you? Can you think about that for a little bit? Do you miss those experiences?

Because it's a fundamentally different set of experiences that you no longer have.

Or is it just a nice thing to have had? You don't see them as that fundamentally different

than you visiting a new country and experiencing new environments?

I guess for me, when I had these experiences, they were somewhat marginal. They were like a

little bonus kind of experience. I know there are people who have much more serious forms of

synesthesia than this for whom it's absolutely central to their lives. I know people who,

when they experience new people, they have colors, maybe they have tastes. And so on,

every time they see writing, it has colors. Some people, whenever they hear music,

it's got a certain really rich color pattern. And for some synesthetes, it's absolutely

central. And I think if they lost it, they'd be devastated. Again, for me, it was a very,

very mild form of synesthesia. And it's like, yeah, it's like those interesting experiences.

You might get under different auto states of consciousness and so on. It's kind of cool.

But not necessarily the single most important experiences in your life.

Got it. So let's try to go to the very simplest question that you've answered many times,

but perhaps the simplest things can help us reveal even in time some new ideas.

So what, in your view, is consciousness? What is qualia? What is the hard problem of consciousness?

Consciousness. I mean, the word is used many ways, but the kind of consciousness that I'm

interested in is basically subjective experience. What it feels like from the inside to be a human

being or any other conscious being. I mean, there's something it's like to be me right now. I have

visual images that I'm experiencing. I'm hearing my voice. I've got maybe some emotional tone.

I've got a stream of thoughts running through my head. These are all things that I experience

from the first person point of view. I've sometimes called this the inner movie in the mind. It's not

a perfect, it's not a perfect metaphor. It's not like a movie in every ways and in every way. And

it's very rich. But yeah, it's just direct subjective experience. And I call that consciousness or

sometimes philosophers use the word qualia, which you suggest that people tend to use the word

qualia for things like the qualities of things like colors, redness, the experience of redness

versus the experience of greenness, the experience of one taste or one smell versus another, the

experience of the quality of pain. And yeah, a lot of consciousness is the experience of those

qualities. Well, consciousness is bigger, the entirety of any kind of experience.

Consciousness of thinking is not obviously qualia. It's not like specific qualities like

redness or greenness, but still I'm thinking about my hometown and I'm thinking about what I'm going

to do later on. Maybe there's still something running through my head, which is subjective

experience. Maybe it goes beyond those qualities or qualia. Philosophers sometimes use the word

phenomenal consciousness for consciousness in this sense. I mean, people also talk about

access consciousness, being able to access information in your mind, reflective consciousness,

being able to think about yourself. But it looks like the really mysterious one, the one that really

gets people going is phenomenal consciousness. The fact that all this, the fact that there's

subjective experience and all this feels like something at all. And then the hard problem is

how is it that, why is it that there is phenomenal consciousness at all? And how is it that physical

processes in a brain could give you subjective experience? It looks like on the face of it,

you could have all this big, complicated physical system in a brain running without

giving subjective experience at all. And yet we do have subjective experience. So the hard problem

is just explain that. Explain how that comes about. We haven't been able to build machines where

a red light goes on that says it's not conscious. So how do we actually create that? Or how do

humans do it? And how do we ourselves do it? We do every now and then create machines

that can do this. We create babies that are conscious. They've got these brains. I think

that brain does produce consciousness. But even though we can create it,

we still don't understand why it happens. Maybe eventually we'll be able to create machines,

which as a matter of fact, AI machines, which as a matter of fact,

are conscious. But that won't necessarily make the hard problem go away any more than it does

with babies. Because we still want to know how and why is it that these processes

give you consciousness? You just made me realize for a second, maybe it's

a totally dumb realization. But nevertheless, that as a useful way to think about the creation

of consciousness is looking at a baby. So that there's a certain point at which that baby is not

conscious. The baby starts from maybe, I don't know, from a few cells. There's a certain point

at which it becomes consciousness arrives. It's conscious. Of course, we can't know exactly that

line. But that's a useful idea that we do create consciousness. Again, a really dumb thing for

me to say, but not until now that I realize we do engineer consciousness. We get to watch the

process happen. We don't know which point it happens or where it is. But we do see the birth

of consciousness. Yeah, I mean, there's a question, of course, is whether babies are conscious

when they're born. And it used to be, it seems at least some people thought they weren't,

which is why they didn't give anesthetics to newborn babies when they circumcised them.

And so now people think, oh, that's incredibly cruel. Of course, of course, babies feel pain.

And now the dominant view is that the babies can feel pain. Actually, my partner, Claudia,

works on this whole issue of whether there's consciousness in babies and of what kind. And

she certainly thinks that newborn babies come into the world with some degree of consciousness.

Of course, then you can just extend the question backwards to fetuses and

suddenly you're into politically controversial territory. But the question also arises in

the animal kingdom. Where does consciousness start or stop? Is there a line in the animal kingdom

where the first conscious organisms are? And it's interesting. Over time, people are becoming

more and more liberal about ascribing consciousness to animals. People used to think, maybe only mammals

could be conscious. Now most people seem to think sure, fish are conscious, they can

feel pain. And now we're arguing over insects. You'll find people out there who say plants

have some degree of consciousness. So who knows where it's going to end. The far end

of this chain is the view that every physical system has some degree of consciousness.

Philosophers call that panpsychism. I take that view. I mean, that's a fascinating way to view

reality. So if you could talk about, if you can linger on panpsychism for a little bit,

what does it mean? So it's not just plants are conscious. I mean, it's that consciousness is

a fundamental fabric of reality. What does that mean to you? How do we supposed to think about

that? Well, we're used to the idea that some things in the world are fundamental, right?

In physics, we take things like space or time or space time, mass, charge as fundamental properties

of the universe. You don't reduce them to something simpler. You take those for granted.

You've got some laws that connect them. Here is how mass and space and time evolve.

Theories like relativity or quantum mechanics or some future theory that will unify them both.

But everyone says you got to take some things as fundamental. And if you can't explain one thing,

in terms of the previous fundamental things, you have to expand. Maybe something like this

happened with Maxwell. He ended up with fundamental principles of electromagnetism and took charge as

fundamental because it turned out that was the best way to explain it. So I at least take seriously

the possibility something like that could happen with consciousness. Take it as a fundamental

property like space, time, and mass. And instead of trying to explain consciousness wholly in terms

of the evolution of space, time, and mass and so on, take it as a primitive and then connect it

to everything else by some fundamental laws. There's this basic problem that the physics we

have now looks great for solving the easy problems of consciousness, which are all about behavior.

They give us a complicated structure and dynamics that tell us how things are going to behave,

what kind of observable behavior they're produced, which is great for the problems of explaining

how we walk and how we talk and so on. Those are the easy problems of consciousness. But the hard

problem was this problem about subjective experience just doesn't look like that kind of

problem about structure or dynamics, how things behave. So it's hard to see how existing physics

is going to give you a full explanation of that. Certainly trying to get a physics view of

consciousness, yes, there has to be a connecting point and it could be at the very axiomatic,

at the very beginning level. But first of all, there's a crazy idea that everything has properties

of consciousness. At that point, the word consciousness is already beyond the reach of our

current understanding, like far, because it's so far from, at least for me, maybe you can correct me,

it's far from the experiences that we have that I have as a human being. To say that

everything is conscious, that means that basically another way to put that, if that's true, then

we understand almost nothing about that fundamental aspect of the world.

How do you feel about saying an ant is conscious? Do you get the same reaction to that or is that

something you can understand? I can understand ant, I can't understand an atom or plant.

So I'm comfortable with living things on earth, being conscious, because there's some kind of

agency where they're similar size to me and they can be born and they can die, and that is understandable

intuitively. Of course, you anthropomorphize, you put yourself in the place of the plant,

but I can understand it. I mean, I'm not like, I don't believe actually that plants are conscious

of that plant's software, but I can understand that kind of belief, that kind of idea.

How do you feel about robots? Like the kind of robots we have now, if I told you like that a

Roomba had some degree of consciousness or some deep neural network?

I could understand that a Roomba has conscious. I just had spent all day at iRobot,

and I personally love robots and I have a deep connection with robots. I also probably

anthropomorphize them, but there's something about the physical object. So there's a difference

than a neural network, a neural network running a software. To me, the physical object,

something about the human experience allows me to really see that physical object is an entity,

and if it moves, it moves in a way that there's a, like I didn't program it,

where it feels that it's acting based on its own perception. And yes, self awareness and

consciousness, even if it's a Roomba, then you start to assign it to some agency, some consciousness.

So, but to say that panpsychism, that consciousness is a fundamental property of

reality is a much bigger statement, that it's like turtles all the way. It doesn't end,

the whole thing. So like how, I know it's full of mystery, but if you can linger on it,

like how would it, how do you think about reality if consciousness is a fundamental

part of its fabric? The way you get there is from thinking, can we explain consciousness given the

existing fundamentals? And then if you can't, at least right now, it looks like, then you've got

to add something. It doesn't follow that you have to add consciousness. Here's another interesting

possibility is we'll add something else. Let's call it proto consciousness or X. Right. And then

it turns out space time mass plus X will somehow collectively give you the possibility for for

consciousness. When it rule out that view, either I call that pan proto psychism, because maybe

there's some other property proto consciousness at the bottom level. And if you can't imagine,

there's actually genuine consciousness at the bottom level. I think we should be open to the

idea there's this other thing X. Maybe we can't imagine that somehow gives you consciousness.

But if we are playing along with the idea that there really is genuine consciousness

at the bottom level, of course, this is going to be way out and speculative. But at least

didn't say if it was classical physics, then we'd have to end up saying, well, every little

atom with a bunch of particles in space time, each of these particles has some kind of consciousness

whose structure mirrors maybe their physical properties, like its mass, charge, its velocity,

and so on. The structure of its consciousness would roughly correspond to that and the physical

interactions between particles. I mean, there's this old worry about physics. I mentioned this

before in this issue about the manifest image. We don't really find out about the intrinsic

nature of things. Physics tells us about how a particle relates to other particles and interacts.

It doesn't tell us about what the particle is in itself. That was Kant's thing in itself.

So here's a view. The nature in itself of a particle is something mental. A particle is

actually a little conscious subject with properties of its consciousness that correspond to its

physical properties. The laws of physics are actually ultimately relating these properties of

conscious subjects. On this view, a Newtonian world, it actually would be a vast collection of

little conscious subjects at the bottom level. Way, way simpler than we are without free will

or rationality or anything like that. But that's what the universe would be like.

Now, of course, that's a vastly speculative view. No particular reason to think it's correct.

Furthermore, nonNewtonian physics is a quantum mechanical wave function. Suddenly,

it starts to look different. It's not a vast collection of conscious subjects. Maybe there's

ultimately one big wave function for the whole universe corresponding to that. It might be

something more like a single conscious mind whose structure corresponds to the structure

of the wave function. People sometimes call this cosmopsychism. And now, of course, we're in the

realm of extremely speculative philosophy. There's no direct evidence for this. But yeah,

but if you want a picture of what that universe would be like, think, yeah, giant cosmic mind

with enough richness and structure among it to replicate all the structure of physics.

I think, therefore, I am at the level of particles and with quantum mechanics,

it's a level of the wave function. It's kind of an exciting,

beautiful possibility, of course, way out of reach of physics currently.

It is interesting that some neuroscientists are beginning to take panpsychism seriously,

that you find consciousness even in very simple systems. So, for example,

the integrated information theory of consciousness and a lot of neuroscientists are

taking seriously. Actually, I just got this new book by Christoph Koch, just came in,

The Feeling of Life Itself, by consciousness is widespread but can't be computed. He basically

endorses a panpsychist view where you get consciousness with the degree of information

processing or integrated information processing in a system and even very, very simple systems,

like a couple of particles will have some degree of this. So, he ends up with some degree of

consciousness in all matter. And the claim is that this theory can actually explain a bunch of stuff

about the connection between the brain and consciousness. Now, that's very controversial.

I think it's very, very early days in the science of consciousness. It's interesting that

it's not just philosophy that might lead you in this direction, but there are ways of thinking

quasi scientifically that lead you there too. But maybe it's different than panpsychism.

What do you think? So, Alan Watts has this quote that I'd like to ask you about. The quote is,

through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to

its harmonies. We are the witnesses to which the universe becomes conscious of its glory,

of its magnificence. So, that's not panpsychism. Do you think that we are essentially the tools,

the senses the universe created to be conscious of itself?

It's an interesting idea. Of course, if you went for the giant cosmic mind view, then the universe

was conscious all along. It didn't need us. We're just little components of the universal

consciousness. Likewise, if you believe in panpsychism, then there was some little degree of

consciousness at the bottom level all along. And we were just a more complex form of consciousness.

So, I think maybe the quote you mentioned works better. If you're not a panpsychist, you're not a

cosmopsychist, you think consciousness just exists at this intermediate level. And of course,

that's the orthodox view. That you would say is the common view. So,

is your own view with panpsychism a rarer view?

I think it's generally regarded certainly as a speculative view held by a fairly small minority

of at least theorists, most philosophers and most scientists who think about consciousness

are not panpsychists. There's been a bit of a movement in that direction the last 10 years or so.

It seems to be quite popular, especially among the younger generation, but it's still very

definitely a minority view. Many people think it's totally batshit crazy to use the technical term.

It's a philosophical term.

So, the orthodox view I think is still consciousness is something that humans have and

some good number of nonhuman animals have. And maybe AIs might have one day, but it's restricted.

On that view, then there was no consciousness at the start of the universe. There may be

none at the end. But is this thing which happened at some point in the history of the universe,

consciousness developed? And yes, that's a very amazing event on this view because

many people are inclined to think consciousness is what somehow gives meaning

to our lives without consciousness. There'd be no meaning, no true value, no good versus bad,

and so on. So, with the advent of consciousness, suddenly the universe went from meaningless

to somehow meaningful. Why did this happen? I guess the quote you mentioned was somehow,

this was somehow destined to happen because the universe needed to have consciousness within it,

to have value and have meaning. And maybe you could combine that with a theistic view

or a teleological view. The universe was inexorably evolving towards consciousness.

Actually, my colleague here at NYU, Tom Nagel, wrote a book called Mind and Cosmos a few years

ago where he argued for this teleological view of evolution toward consciousness,

saying this, let the problems for Darwinism, it's got him on. This is very, very controversial.

Most people didn't agree. I don't myself agree with this teleological view, but it is at least a

beautiful speculative view of the cosmos. What do you think people experience? What do they

seek when they believe in God from this kind of perspective? I'm not an expert on thinking about

God and religion. I'm not myself religious at all.

When people pray, communicate with God with whatever form, I'm not speaking to the practices

and the rituals of religion. I mean, the actual experience of that people really have a deep

connection with God in some cases. What do you think that experience is? It's so common,

at least throughout the history of civilization, that it seems like we seek that.

At the very least, it's an interesting conscious experience that people have when they experience

religious awe or prayer and so on. Neuroscientists have tried to examine what bits of the brain

are active and so on. But yeah, there's this deeper question of what are people looking

for when they're doing this? Like I said, I've got no real expertise on this, but it does seem

that one thing people are after is a sense of meaning and value, a sense of connection

to something greater than themselves that will give their lives meaning and value. Maybe the

thought is if there is a God, then God somehow is a universal consciousness who has invested

this universe with meaning and somehow connection to God might give your life

meaning. I can kind of see the attractions of that, but it still makes me wonder,

why is it exactly that a universal consciousness, God, would be needed to give the world meaning?

If universal consciousness can give the world meaning, why can't local consciousness give the

world meaning too? So I think my consciousness gives my world meaning. Is the origin of meaning

for your world? I experience things as good or bad, happy, sad, interesting, important. So my

consciousness invests this world with meaning. Without any consciousness, maybe it would be a

bleak, meaningless universe. But I don't see why I need someone else's consciousness or even God's

consciousness to give this universe meaning. Here we are, local creatures with our own

subjective experiences. I think we can give the universe meaning ourselves. Maybe to some people

that feels inadequate. Our own local consciousness is somehow too puny and insignificant to invest

any of this with cosmic significance. And maybe God gives you a sense of cosmic significance,

but I'm just speculating here. So, you know, it's a really interesting idea that consciousness

is the thing that makes life meaningful. If you could maybe just briefly explore that for a second.

So I suspect just from listening to you now, you mean in an almost trivial sense, just the day to

day experiences of life have, because of you attach identity to it, they become, well, I guess I want

to ask something I would always wanted to ask a legit world renowned philosopher, what is the

meaning of life? So I suspect you don't mean consciousness gives any kind of greater meaning

to it all and more to day to day. But is there greater meaning to it all?

I think life has meaning for us, because we are conscious. So without consciousness, no meaning,

consciousness invests our life with meaning. So consciousness is the source of the meaning

of life. But I wouldn't say consciousness itself is the meaning of life. I'd say what's meaningful

in life is basically what we find meaningful, what we experience as meaningful. So if you find

meaning and fulfillment and value in say, intellectual work, like understanding, then

that's a very significant part of the meaning of life for you. If you find it in social connections,

or in raising a family, then that's the meaning of life for you. The meaning kind of comes from what

you value as a conscious creature. So I think there's no, on this view, there's no universal

solution. No universal answer to the question, what is the meaning of life? The meaning of life is

where you find it as a conscious creature. But it's consciousness that somehow makes value

possible, experiencing some things as good or as bad or as meaningful. Something comes from

within consciousness. So you think consciousness is a crucial component, ingredient of assigning

value to things? I mean, it's kind of a fairly strong intuition that without consciousness,

there wouldn't really be any value. If we just had a purely, a universe of unconscious creatures,

would anything be better or worse than anything else? Certainly when it comes to ethical

dilemmas, you know, about the older, the old trolley problem, do you kill one person or do

you switch to the other track to kill five? Well, I've got a variant on this, the zombie trolley

problem, where there's one conscious being on one track and five humanoid zombies. Let's make them

robots who are not conscious on the other track. Do you, given that choice, do you kill the one

conscious being or the five unconscious robots? Most people have a fairly clear intuition here.

Yeah. Kill the unconscious beings because they basically, they don't have a meaningful life.

They're not really persons, conscious beings at all. Of course, we don't have good intuition about

something like an unconscious being. So in philosophical terms, you refer to as a zombie,

it's a useful thought experiment, construction in philosophical terms, but we don't yet have them.

So that's kind of what we may be able to create with robots. And I don't necessarily know what that

even means. Yeah, they're merely hypothetical. For now, they're just a thought experiment. They may

never be possible. I mean, the extreme case of a zombie is a being which is physically,

functionally, behaviorally identical to me, but not conscious. That's a mere, I don't think that

could ever be built in this universe. The question is just, could we, does that hypothetically make

sense? That's kind of a useful contrast class to raise questions like, why aren't we zombies?

How does it come about that we're conscious? And we're not like that. But there are less

extreme versions of this, like robots, which are maybe not physically identical to us,

maybe not even functionally identical to us, maybe they've got a different architecture,

but they can do a lot of sophisticated things, maybe carry on a conversation,

but they're not conscious. And that's not so far out. We've got simple computer systems,

at least tending in that direction. Now, and presumably, this is going to get more and more

sophisticated over years to come, where we may have some pretty, at least quite straightforward

to conceive of some pretty sophisticated robot systems that can use language and be fairly

high functioning without consciousness at all. Then I stipulate that. I mean, of course, there's

this tricky question of how you would know where do they're conscious. But let's say we somehow

solve that, and we know that these high functioning robots aren't conscious. Then the question is,

do they have moral status? Does it matter how we treat them? What does moral status mean?

That's basically the same question. Can they suffer? Does it matter how we treat them? For

example, if I mistreat this glass, this cup by shattering it, then that's bad. Why is it bad

though? It's going to make a mess. It's going to be annoying for me and my partner. And so it's

not bad for the cup. No one would say the cup itself has moral status. Hey, you heard the cup,

and that's doing it a moral harm. Likewise, plants, well, again, if they're not conscious,

most people think by upgrading a plant, you're not harming it. But if a being is conscious,

on the other hand, then you are harming it. So Siri, or I dare not say the name of Alexa.

Anyway, so we don't think we're morally harming Alexa by turning her off or disconnecting her or

even destroying her, whether it's the system or the underlying software system, because we don't

really think she's conscious. On the other hand, you move to the disembodied being in the movie

her, Samantha. I guess she was kind of presented as conscious. And then if you destroyed her,

you'd certainly be committing a serious harm. So I think our strong sense is if a being is

conscious and can undergo subjective experiences, then it matters morally how we treat them. So if

a robot is conscious, it matters. But if a robot is not conscious, then they basically just meet

or a machine and it doesn't matter. So I think at least maybe how we think about this stuff is

fundamentally wrong. But I think a lot of people think about this stuff seriously,

including people who think about, say, the moral treatment of animals and so on, come to the view

that consciousness is ultimately kind of the line between systems where we have to take them into

account and thinking morally about how we act and systems for which we don't. And I think I've seen

you the right or talk about the demonstration of consciousness from a system like that, from a system

like Alexa or a conversational agent, that what you would be looking for is kind of at the very

basic level for the system to have an awareness that I'm just a program. And yet why do I experience

this? Or not to have that experience, but to communicate that to you. So that's what us humans

would sound like. If you all of a sudden woke up one day, like Kafka, right, in the body of a bug

or something, but in a computer, you all of a sudden realized you don't have a body. And yet

you would feeling what you're feeling, you would probably say those kinds of things.

So do you think a system essentially becomes conscious by convincing us that it's conscious

through the words that I just mentioned? So by being confused about the fact that

why am I having these experiences? So basically, I don't think this is what makes you conscious,

but I do think being puzzled about consciousness is a very good sign that a system is conscious. So

if I encountered a robot that actually seemed to be genuinely puzzled by its own mental states

and saying, yeah, I have all these weird experiences and I don't see how to explain them. I know I'm

just a set of silicon circuits, but I don't see how that would give you my consciousness. I would

at least take that as some evidence that there's some consciousness going on there. I don't think

a system needs to be puzzled about consciousness to be conscious. Many people aren't puzzled by

their consciousness. Animals don't seem to be puzzled at all. I still think they're conscious,

but I don't think that's a requirement on consciousness. But I do think if we're looking

for signs for consciousness, say in AI systems, one of the things that will help convince me

that AI system is conscious is if it shows signs of, if it shows signs of introspectively

recognizing something like consciousness and finding this philosophically puzzling in the way

that we do. It's such an interesting thought though, because a lot of people sort of would

at the shallow level criticize the Turing test or language. It's essentially what I heard like

Dan Dennett criticize it in this kind of way, which is it's really puts a lot of emphasis

on lying and being able to imitate human beings. There's this cartoon of the AI system studying

for the Turing test. It's got to read this book called Talk Like a Human. It's like,

man, why do I have to waste my time learning how to imitate humans? Maybe the AI system is going

to be way beyond the hard problem of consciousness and it's going to be just like, why do I need

to waste my time pretending that I recognize a hard problem of consciousness in order for people

to recognize me as conscious? Yeah, it just feels like, I guess the question is, do you think there's

we can never really create a test for consciousness because it feels like we're very human centric

and so the only way we would be convinced that something is conscious is but is basically the

thing demonstrates the illusion of consciousness. We can never really know whether it's conscious

or not. In fact, that almost feels like it doesn't matter then or does it still matter to you

that something is conscious or demonstrates consciousness. You still see that fundamental

distinction. I think to a lot of people, whether a system is conscious or not matters hugely for

many things like how we treat it, can it suffer and so on. But still that leaves open the question,

how can we ever know? And it's true that it's awfully hard to see how we can know for sure

whether a system is conscious. I suspect that sociologically, the thing that's going to convince

us that a system is conscious is in part things like social interaction, conversation, and so on,

where they seem to be conscious. They talk about their conscious states or just talk about being

happy or sad or finding things meaningful or being in pain that will tend to convince us if we don't

the system genuinely seems to be conscious. We don't treat it as such. Eventually, it's going

to seem like a strange form of racism or speciesism or somehow not to acknowledge them.

I truly believe that, by the way. I believe that there is going to be

something akin to the civil rights movement but for robots. I think the moment you have a rumba

to say, please don't kick me, that hurts. Just say it. I think that will fundamentally

change the fabric of our society. I think you're probably right, although it's going to be very

tricky because to say we've got the technology where these conscious beings can just be

created and multiplied by the thousands by flicking a switch. The legal status is going

to be different but ultimately their moral status ought to be the same. The civil rights

issue is going to be a huge mess. If one day somebody clones you, another very real possibility.

In fact, I find the conversation between two copies of David Chalmers quite interesting.

Very thought. Who is this idiot? He's not making any sense.

So what do you think he would be conscious?

I do think he would be conscious. I do think in some sense, I'm not sure it would be me,

there would be two different beings at this point. I think they both be conscious and they

both have many of the same mental properties. I think they both in a way have the same moral

status. It would be wrong to hurt either of them or to kill them and so on. Still, there's some

sense in which probably their legal status would have to be different. If I'm the original and

that one's just a clone, then creating a clone of me, presumably the clone doesn't, for example,

automatically own the stuff that I own or I've got a certain connect to things that

the people I interact with, my family, my partner and so on, I'm going to somehow be connected to

them in a way in which the clone isn't. Because you came slightly first? Yeah, because the clone

would argue that they have really as much of a connection. They have all the memories of that

connection. In a way, you might say it's unfair to discriminate against them, but say you've got

an apartment that only one person can live in or a partner who only one person can be with.

It's an interesting philosophical question, but you might say, because I actually have this history,

if I am the same person as the one that came before and the clone is not, then I have this

history that the clone doesn't. Of course, there's also the question, isn't the clone the same person

too? This is a question about personal identity. If I continue and I create a clone over there,

I want to say this one is me and this one is someone else, but you could take the view that a clone

is equally me. Of course, in a movie like Star Trek, where they have a teletransporter,

it basically creates clones all the time. They treat the clones as if they're the original

person. Of course, they destroy the original body in Star Trek. There's only one left around,

and only very occasionally the things go wrong and you get two copies of Captain Kirk. It's

somehow our legal system at the very least is going to have to sort out some of these issues,

and maybe that's what's moral and what's legally acceptable are going to come apart.

What question would you ask a clone of yourself? Is there something useful you can find out

about him, about the fundamentals of consciousness even?

Kind of in principle, I know that if it's a perfect clone, it's going to behave just like me,

so I'm not sure I'm going to be able to... I can discover whether it's a perfect clone by

seeing whether it answers like me, but otherwise, I know what I'm going to find is being which is

just like me, except that it's just undergone this great shock of discovering that it's a clone.

So just so you woke me up tomorrow and said, hey Dave, sorry to tell you this, but you're actually

the clone, and you provided me really convincing evidence, showed me the film of my being cloned,

and then all wrapped up here, being here and waking up. So you proved to me I'm a clone,

well okay, I would find that shocking, and who knows how I would react to this. So maybe by

talking to the clone, I'd find something about my own psychology that I can't find out so easily,

like how I'd react upon discovering that I'm a clone. I could certainly ask the clone if it's

conscious, and what his consciousness is like, and so on, but I guess I kind of know if it's a

perfect clone, it's going to behave roughly like me. Of course, at the beginning, there'll be a

question about whether a perfect clone is possible, so I may want to ask it lots of questions to see

if it's consciousness, and the way it talks about its consciousness, and the way it reacts to things

in general is like me, and that will occupy us for a while. It's a basic unit testing on the

early models. So if it's a perfect clone, you say it's going to behave exactly like you, so that

takes us to free will. So is there a free will? Are we able to make decisions that are not predetermined

from the initial conditions of the universe? Philosophers do this annoying thing of saying

it depends on what you mean. So in this case, it really depends on what you mean by free will.

If you mean something which was not determined in advance, could never have been determined,

then I don't know if we have free will. I mean, there's quantum mechanics, and who's to say if

that opens up some room, but I'm not sure we have free will in that sense. I'm also not sure

that's the kind of free will that really matters. What matters to us is being able to do what we

want, and to create our own futures. We've got this distinction between having our lives be under

our control, and under someone else's control. We've got the sense of actions that we are responsible

for versus ones that we're not. I think you can make those distinctions even in a deterministic

universe, and this is what people call the compatibilist view of free will, where it's

compatible with determinism. So I think for many purposes, the kind of free will

that matters is something we can have in a deterministic universe, and I can't see any

reason in principle why an AI system couldn't have free will of that kind. If you mean super

duper free will, the ability to violate the laws of physics and doing things that in principle

could not be predicted? I don't know. Maybe no one has that kind of free will. What's the connection

between the reality of free will and the experience of it, the subjective experience,

in your view? So how does consciousness connect to the experience of free will?

It's certainly true that when we make decisions and when we choose and so on, we feel like we

have an open future. Yes, I feel like I could do this. I could go into philosophy or I could go

into math. I could go to a movie tonight. I could go to a restaurant. So we experience these things

as if the future is open, and maybe we experience ourselves as exerting a kind of

effect on the future that's somehow picking out one path from many paths that were previously open.

And you might think that actually if we're in a deterministic universe, there's a sense of which

objectively those paths weren't really open all along, but subjectively they were open.

And that's I think that's what really matters in making a decision. So our experience of making a

decision is choosing a path for ourselves. I mean, in general, our introspective models

of the mind, I think are generally very distorted representations of the mind.

So it may well be that our experience of ourself in making a decision, our experience of what's

going on, doesn't terribly well mirror what's going on. I mean, maybe there are antecedents

in the brain way before anything came into consciousness and so on. Those aren't represented

in our introspective models. So in general, our experience of perception, it's like I experience

a perceptual image of the external world. It's not a terribly good model of what's actually going

on in my visual cortex and so on, which has all these layers and so on. It's just one little

snapshot of one bit of that. So in general, introspective models are very oversimplified and

it wouldn't be surprising if that was true of free will as well. This also incidentally

can be applied to consciousness itself. There is this very interesting view that

consciousness itself is an introspective illusion. In fact, we're not conscious,

but the brain just has these introspective models of itself or oversimplifies everything

and represents itself as having these special properties of consciousness. It's a really simple

way to keep track of itself and so on. And then on the illusionist view, yeah, that's just an

illusion. I find this view, when I find it implausible, I do find it very attractive

in some ways because it's easier to tell some story about how the brain would create introspective

models of its own consciousness, of its own free will as a way of simplifying itself. I mean,

it's a similar way when we perceive the external world. We perceive it as having these colors that

maybe it doesn't really have, but of course that's a really useful way of keeping track.

Did you say that you find it not very plausible? Because I find it both plausible and

attractive in some sense because I mean, that kind of view is one that has the minimum amount of

mystery around it. You can kind of understand that kind of view. Everything else says we don't

understand so much of this picture. Now, it is very attractive. I recently wrote an article

all about this kind of issue called the metaproblem of consciousness. The hard problem is how does

the brain give you consciousness? The metaproblem is why are we puzzled by the hard problem of

consciousness? Because being puzzled by it, that's ultimately a bit of behavior. We might be able

to explain that bit of behavior as one of the easy problems, consciousness. So maybe there'll be some

computational model that explains why we're puzzled by consciousness. The metaproblem has come up

with that model. And I've been thinking about that a lot lately. There's some interesting stories

you can tell about why the right kind of computational system might develop these

introspective models of itself that attributed itself, these special properties. So that metaproblem

is a research program for everyone. And then if you've got attraction to sort of simple views,

desert landscapes, and so on, then you can go all the way with what people call illusionism

and say, in fact, consciousness itself is not real. What is real is just these introspective

models we have that tell us that we're conscious. So the view is very simple, very attractive,

very powerful. The trouble is, of course, it has to say that deep down consciousness is not real.

We're not actually experiencing right now. And it looks like it's just contradicting a fundamental

datum of our existence. And this is why most people find this view crazy, just as they find

panpsychism crazy in one way. People find illusionism crazy in another way. So yes,

it has to deny this fundamental datum of our existence. Now, that makes the view sort of

frankly unbelievable for most people. On the other hand, the view developed right,

might be able to explain why we find it unbelievable. Because these models are so deeply

hardwired into our head. And they're all integrated. You can't escape the illusion.

And as a crazy possibility, is it possible that the entirety of the universe, our planet,

all the people in New York, all the organisms on our planet, including me here today, are not real

in that sense. They're all part of an illusion inside of Dave Chalmers's head.

I think all this could be a simulation. No, but not just a simulation. Because the simulation

kind of is outside of you. A dream? What if it's all an illusion? Yes, a dream

that you're experiencing. It's all in your mind. Can you take illusionism that far?

Well, there's illusionism about the external world and illusionism about consciousness.

Illusionism about the external world kind of takes you back to Descartes.

And yeah, could all this be produced by an evil demon? Descartes himself also had

the dream argument. He said, how do you know you're not dreaming right now? How do you know this is

not an amazing dream? And it's at least a possibility that, yeah, this could be some super duper,

complex dream in the next universe up. I guess, though, my attitude is that

just as, I mean, Descartes thought that if the evil demon was doing it, it's not real. A lot of

people these days say if a simulation is doing it, it's not real. As I was saying before, I think

even if it's a simulation, that doesn't stop this from being real. It just tells us what the world

is made of. Likewise, if it's a dream, it could turn out that all this is like my dream created by

my brain in the next universe up. My only view is that wouldn't stop this physical world from

being real. It would turn out this cup at the most fundamental level was made of a bit of, say, my

consciousness in the dreaming mind at the next level up. Maybe that would give you a kind of weird

kind of panpsychism about reality, but it wouldn't show that the cup isn't real. It would just tell

us it's ultimately made of processes in my dreaming mind. So I'd resist the idea that if the physical

world is a dream, then it's an illusion. That's right. By the way, perhaps you have an interesting

thought about it. Why is Descartes demon or genius considered evil? Why couldn't have been a benevolent

one that had the same powers? Yeah. I mean, Descartes called it the Malangene, the evil genie or

evil genius. Malign, I guess, was the word. But yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean,

a later philosophy, Barclay, said, no, in fact, all this is done by God. God actually

supplies you all of these perceptions and ideas, and that's how physical reality is sustained.

Interestingly, Barclay's God is doing something that doesn't look so different from what Descartes

evil demon was doing. It's just that Descartes thought it was deception, and Barclay thought

it was not. I'm actually more sympathetic to Barclay here. Yeah, this evil demon may be trying

to deceive you, but I think, okay, well, the evil demon may just be working under a false

philosophical theory. It thinks it's deceiving you, it's wrong. It's like there's machines

on the matrix. They thought they were deceiving you that all this stuff is real. I think, no,

if we're in a matrix, it's all still real. Yeah, the philosopher, okay, Bhusma had a nice story

about this about 50 years ago about Descartes evil demon, where he said this demon spends all

its time trying to fool people, but fails, because somehow all the demon ends up doing

is constructing realities for people. So yeah, I think that maybe if it's very natural to take

this view that if we're in a simulation or evil demon scenario or something, then none of this

is real. But I think it may be ultimately a philosophical mistake, especially if you take

on board sort of the view of reality or what matters to reality is really its structure,

something like its mathematical structure and so on, which seems to be the view that a lot of

people take from contemporary physics. And it looks like you can find all that mathematical

structure in a simulation, maybe even in a dream, and so on. So as long as that structure is real,

I would say that's enough for the physical world to be real. Yeah, the physical world may turn

out to be somewhat more intangible than we had thought and have a surprising nature, but

we've already gotten very used to that from modern science. See, you've kind of alluded that you

don't have to have consciousness for high levels of intelligence, but to create truly general

intelligence systems, AGI systems, human level intelligence, and perhaps super human level

intelligence, you've talked about that you feel like that kind of thing might be very far away,

but nevertheless, when we reach that point, do you think consciousness from an engineering

perspective is needed, or at least highly beneficial for creating an AGI system?

Yeah, no one knows what consciousness is for functionally. So right now, there's no specific

thing we can point to and say, you need consciousness for that. So my inclination is to

believe that in principle, AGI is possible. At the very least, I don't see why someone couldn't

simulate a brain. Ultimately, have a computational system that produces all of our behavior. And

if that's possible, I'm sure vastly many other computational systems of equal or greater

sophistication are possible with all of our cognitive functions and more. And my inclination

is to think that once you've got all these cognitive functions, perception, attention,

reasoning, introspection, language, emotion, and so on, it's very likely you'll have consciousness

as well. At least it's very hard for me to see how you'd have a system that had all those things

while bypassing somehow conscious. So just naturally, it's integrated quite naturally.

There's a lot of overlap about the kind of function that required to achieve each of those

things. So you can't disentangle them even when you're created. It seems to, at least in us,

but we don't know what the causal role of consciousness in the physical world, what it

does. I mean, just say it turns out consciousness does something very specific in the physical

world like collapsing wave functions, as on one common interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Then ultimately, we might find some place where it actually makes a difference. And we could say,

ah, here is where in collapsing wave functions, it's driving the behavior of a system. And maybe

it could even turn out that for AGI, you'd need something playing that. I mean, if you wanted

to connect this to free will, some people think consciousness collapsing wave functions, that

would be how the conscious mind exerts effects on the physical world and exerts its free will.

And maybe it could turn out that any AGI that didn't utilize that mechanism would be limited

in the kinds of functionality that it had. I don't myself find that plausible. I think probably

that functionality could be simulated. But you could imagine, once we had a very specific idea

about the role of consciousness in the physical world, this would have some impact

on the capacity of AGI's. And if it was a role that could not be duplicated elsewhere,

then we'd have to find some way to either get consciousness in the system to play that role

or to simulate it. If we can isolate a particular role to consciousness, of course, that's

incredibly, seems like an incredibly difficult thing. Do you have worries about existential

threats of conscious, intelligent beings that are not us? So certainly, I'm sure you're worried

about us from an existential threat perspective, but outside of us, AI systems.

There's a couple of different kinds of existential threats here. One is an existential

threat to consciousness generally. I mean, yes, I care about humans and the survival of humans

and so on, but just say it turns out that eventually we're replaced by some artificial

beings that aren't humans, but are somehow our successes. They still have good lives.

They still do interesting and wonderful things with the universe. I don't think that's not so bad.

That's just our successes. We were one stage in evolution. Something different, maybe better,

came next. If, on the other hand, all of consciousness was wiped out, that would be a

very serious moral disaster. One way that could happen is by all intelligent life

being wiped out. Many people think that, yeah, once you get to humans and

AIs, an amazing sophistication where everyone has got the ability to create weapons that can

destroy the whole universe just by pressing a button, then maybe it's inevitable. All intelligent

life will die out. That would certainly be a disaster. We've got to think very hard about

how to avoid that. Another interesting kind of disaster is that maybe intelligent life is not

wiped out, but all consciousness is wiped out. Just say you thought, unlike what I was saying

a moment ago, that there are two different kinds of intelligent systems, some which are conscious

and some which are not. Just say it turns out that we create AGI with a high degree of

intelligence, meaning high degree of sophistication and its behavior, but with no consciousness

at all. That AGI could take over the world, maybe, but then there'd be no consciousness

in this world. This would be a world of zombies. Some people have called this the zombie apocalypse.

Because it's an apocalypse for consciousness. Consciousness is gone. You've really got this

super intelligent, nonconscious robot. I would say that's a moral disaster in the same way.

In almost the same way that the world with no intelligent life is a moral disaster. All value

and meaning may be gone from that world. These are both threats to watch out for. Now, my own

view is if you get super intelligence, you're almost certainly going to bring consciousness

with it. I hope that's not going to happen, but of course, I don't understand consciousness. No one

understands consciousness. This is one reason, at least among many, for thinking very seriously

about consciousness and thinking about the kind of future we want to create in a world with humans

and or AIs. How do you feel about the possibility if consciousness so naturally does come with AGI

systems that we are just a step in the evolution, that we will be just something a blimp on the

record that'll be studied in books by the AGI systems centuries from now?

I mean, I think I'd probably be okay with that, especially if somehow humans are continuous with

AGI. I mean, I think something like this is inevitable. The very least humans are going

to be transformed. We're going to be augmented by technology. That's already happening in all

kinds of ways. We're going to be transformed by technology where our brains are going to be

uploaded and computationally enhanced. Eventually, that line between what's a human and what's an

AI may be hard to draw. How much does it matter, for example, that some future being a thousand

years from now that somehow descended from us actually still has biology? I think it would be

nice if you could point to its cognitive system, point to some parts that had some roots in us

and trace a continuous line there that would be selfishly nice for me to think that, okay,

I'm connected to this thread line through the future of the world. But it turns out, okay,

there's a jump there. They found a better way to design cognitive systems. They designed a whole

new kind of thing. And the only line is some causal chain of designing and systems that

designed better systems. Is that so much worse? I don't know. We're still at least part of a

causal chain of design. And yes, they're not humans, but still they're our successes. Ultimately,

I think it's probably inevitable that something like that will happen. At least we were part

of the process. It'd be nice if they still cared enough about us to maybe to engage with our

arguments. I'm really hoping that the AGI's are going to solve all the problems of philosophy.

They'll come back and read all this crappy work for the 20th and 21st century hard

problem of consciousness. And I hear is why they got it wrong. And so if that happened,

then I'd really feel like I was part of at least an intellectual process over centuries. And that

would be kind of cool. I'm pretty sure they would clone or they would recreate David Chalmers. And

for the fun of it, sort of bring back other philosophers, Descartes, and just put them

in a room and just watch. It'll be a Netflix of the future show where you bring philosophers

from different human, 100% human philosophers from previous generations, put them in a room,

and see them. I am totally up for that. Simulators, AGI's of the future, if you're watching this

podcast, do that. I would like to be recreated. Who would Descartes? If you could hang out as

part of such a TV show with a philosopher that's no longer with us from long ago, who would you

choose? Descartes would have to be right up there. Oh, actually, a couple of months ago,

I got to have a conversation with Descartes, an actor who's actually a philosopher came out on

stage playing Descartes. I didn't know this was going to happen. And I'd start when I gave a talk

and told me about how my ideas were crap and all derived from him. And so we had a long,

we had a long argument. This was great. You know, I would love to see what Descartes would think

about AI, for example, and the modern neuroscience. And so I suspect not too much would surprise him,

but William James, for a psychologist of consciousness, I think James was probably the

richest. But oh, there are manual cards. I never really understood what he was up to if I got to

actually talk to him about some of this. Hey, there was Princess Elizabeth, who talked with

Descartes and who really, you know, got at the problems of how Descartes ideas of non physical

mind interacting with the, with the physical body couldn't really work. She's been kind of

most philosophers think she's been proved right. So maybe put me in a room with Descartes and

Princess Elizabeth and we can all argue it out. What kind of future so we talked about

with zombies, a concerning future, but what kind of future excites you? What do you think if we

look forward, sort of, we're at the very early stages of understanding consciousness. And we're

now at the early stages of being able to engineer complex, interesting systems that have degrees

of intelligence. So maybe one day we'll have degrees of consciousness, maybe be able to

to upload brains, all those possibilities, virtual reality. What is there a particular aspect to

this future world that just excites you? I think there are lots of different aspects. I mean,

frankly, I want it to hurry up and happen. So yeah, we've had some progress lately in AI and VR,

but in the grand scheme of things, it's still kind of slow. The changes are not yet transformative.

And you know, I'm in my fifties, I've only got so long left. I'd like, I'd like to see really

serious AI in my lifetime and really serious virtual worlds. Because yeah, once people,

I would like to be able to hang out in a virtual reality, which is richer, then then then this

reality to really get to inhabit fundamentally different kinds of spaces. Well, I would very

much like to be able to upload my mind onto a onto a computer. So maybe I don't have to die.

If this is maybe gradually replaced my neurons with silicon chips and inhabit a computer,

selfishly, that would be, that would be wonderful. I suspect I'm not going to quite get there

in my lifetime. But once that's possible, then you've got the possibility of transforming your

consciousness in remarkable ways, augmenting it, enhancing it. So let me ask then if such a system

is a possibility within your lifetime, and you were given the opportunity to become immortal

in this kind of way, would you choose to be immortal?

Yes, I totally would. I know some people say they couldn't, it'll be awful to be,

to be immortal, be so boring or something. I don't see, I really don't see, don't see why

this might be. I mean, even if it's just ordinary life that continues, ordinary life

is not so bad. But furthermore, I kind of suspect that if the universe is going to go on forever or

indefinitely, it's going to continue to be interesting. I don't think your view was that

we just hit this one romantic point of interest now and afterwards it's all going to be boring,

super intelligent, stasis. I guess my vision is more like, no, it's going to continue to be

infinitely interesting. As you go up the set theoretic hierarchy, you go from the finite

cardinals to aleph zero, and then through there to all the aleph one and aleph two,

and maybe the continuum, and you keep taking power sets. In set theory, they've got these results

that actually all this is fundamentally unpredictable. It doesn't follow any simple

computational patterns. There's new levels of creativity as the set theoretic universe expands

and expands. I guess that's my future. That's my optimistic vision of the future of super

intelligence. It will keep expanding and keep growing, but still being fundamentally unpredictable

at many points. I mean, yes, this creates all kinds of worries like, couldn't it all be fragile

and be destroyed at any point? So we're going to need a solution to that problem. If we get

to stipulate that I'm immortal, well, I hope that I'm not just immortal and stuck in the single

world forever, but I'm immortal and get to take heart in this process of going through

infinitely rich, created futures. Rich, unpredictable, exciting. Well, I think I speak

for a lot of people in saying, I hope you do become immortal, and there'll be that Netflix

show of the future where you get to argue with Descartes, perhaps for all eternity.

So, Dave, it was an honor. Thank you so much for talking today.

Thanks. It was a pleasure.

Thanks for listening to this conversation, and thank you to our presenting sponsor,

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at Lex Freedman. And now let me leave you with some words from David Chalmers. Materialism

is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness,

we have to go beyond the resources it provides. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.