David Chalmers: The Hard Problem of Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #69
the following is a conversation with David Chalmers he's a philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind philosophy 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 exists at all consciousness is almost entirely mystery many people who worry about AI safety in 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 this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube give it five stars an Apple podcast supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter at lex friedman spelled fri DM 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Store or Google Play and use the code lex podcast you'll get $10 and cash app will also donate $10 to first one of my favorite organizations helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world 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 you know the big one is how do we know anything about the external world Descartes said you know 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 the modern version of that is how do you know you're not in a simulation then the thought is if you're in a simulation none of this is real so that's teaching you something to give out 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 I mean 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 called 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 that we interact with the world to the world by perceiving it it only really exists through the window of our perception system and in our mind so differs means something that's quote-unquote real that exists perhaps without us being there and and the the world a as you perceive it well the world as we perceive it as a very simplified and distorted version of what's going on underneath we already know that from just thinking about science you know you don't see too many obviously quantum mechanical effects and what we what we perceive but we still know quantum mechanics is going on under all things so I 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 there's a that's what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars 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 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 se quasi scientific or metaphysical reality is going on underneath the world with a 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 could help tell us about that maybe philosophy could help tell us about that - and if we eventually take the red pill and find out we're in a simulation in my view is that's just another view about what reality is made of you know the philosopher Immanuel 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 and he said what is the nature of the thing and 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 on a computer in the next universe up yeah that's what people tend to do and they think about simulation they think about our modern computers and somehow trivially crudely just scaled up and but do you think the simulation I mean 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 like 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 is that it just get this into this fuzzy area that's not useful at all yeah well obviously 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 gonna have obvious problems here if the universe is finite there's just no way that's gonna work maybe there's some cute way to make it work if the universe is a is a is infinite maybe an infinite universe could somehow simulate a copy of itself but that's a that's gonna 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 can think of it and 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 there could be these kind of levels of universes and you've also mentioned this hilarious idea maybe tongue-in-cheek maybe not that there may be simulations within simulations arbitrarily stacked levels and that there may be that we may be in level 42 oh yeah along those stacks referencing Hitchhiker'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 there right would expect that zero is truly enormous I mean not just if it's finite it's some extraordinarily large finite capacity much more likely its infinite maybe it's a maybe it's got something very high etcetera to cardinalities that enables it to support just any number of any number of simulations so high degree of infinity at level zero slight little slightly smaller degree of infinity at at level one so by the time you get down to us at level 42 maybe 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 are going to be able to be able to get running so I think we can certainly confidently say that if we hurt level 42 then the top level is pretty pretty damn big so it gets more and more constrained as we get down levels more and more simplified and constrained and limited resources and you know we still have plenty of capacity here what was it a Fineman 30 said there's plenty of room at the bottom you know we're still you know 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 universes is infinite but still it's 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 their capacity significantly do you think the the human mind us people in terms of the complexity of simulation as at the height of what the simulation might 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 we're not that impressive are we above average I mean I think high human beings are a certain point in the scale of intelligence which made many things possible you know 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 or maybe 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 and so on so we had just at the beginning of that on the evolutionary threshold it's kind of like we just got there you know who knows a few thousands 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 we're somewhere very near the bottom I would expect that for example if we're in a if we're in a simulation then the simulators who created a sir got the capacity to be far more sophisticated for at level 42 who knows what the ones at level zero I like it's also possible that this is the epitome of what is possible to achieve so we as human beings 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 if you make us much 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 of where this little baby that and there's so much growth and potential but this could also be it well this is the most amazing thing is us maybe what you're saying is consistent with what I'm saying I mean we can still have levels of intelligence far beyond us but maybe those levels of intelligence on your view would be kind of boring and you know we get kind of get so good at everything that life suddenly becomes uni-dimensional so we're just in happening in happening this once part of like maximal romanticism and history of evolution yes you get to humans and it's like yeah and then years to come our super intelligent descendents are gonna look back at us and say those were the days when and they just hit the point of inflection and life was interesting I am an optimist so I'd like to think that you know if there is super intelligence somewhere in the in the future they'll figure out how to make life super interesting and super romantic when you know what they're gonna do it so what they're gonna do is they realize how boring life is when you're super intelligent so they created a new level of a simulation 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 a simulation every time you get really bored with how smart and this would be kind of sad though because it would show the peak of their existence would be like watching simulations for entertainment by saying the peak of our existence now is Netflix know it's alright a flipside of that could be the peak of our existence for many people having children and watching them grow hmm that becomes very meaningful okay so create a simulation it's like creating a family creating like well any kind of creation is uh it's kind of a powerful act dealing is easier to simulate the mind or the universe so I've heard several people including Nick Bostrom 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 this the entirety of it the entirety 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 is obvious it has to be simpler to simply simulate the mind than to simulate the universe because the mind is part of the universe and in order to fully simulate the universe you're gonna have to simulate the mind's eye just by talking about partial simulations and I guess the question is which comes first there's a 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 could behaves mm-hmm simulating the mind requires you to have a little bit more we're now in a little bit of a crazy lab 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 the brain rather than rather than the mind the brain is just a big physical system the universe is a giant physical system I 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 for the brain than for its 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 my consciousness will you get thinking will you get free will and so on and that's that's something philosophers ever have argued over for four years my own view is if you see 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 like 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 arise 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 patents 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 a silicon circuits that play the same role the behavior will continue to be the same and you know I think just the key about what is the true I when I think about the connection the isomorphisms between consciousness and the brain the deepest connections to me seemed to connect consciousness to patterns of information processing not specific biology so I at least adopted as my working hypothesis that basically it's the computation and the information that matters for consciousness the same time we don't understand consciousness it should be wrong so the computation the flow the processing manipulation of information the 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 in the hardware which we could view as as software it may not be some of you just like 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 have a 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 ok can we be conscious in 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 or you know or interesting but limited in certain ways in particular they relying on us having a brain and so on which is outside the virtual world maybe I'll strap on my VR headset I'll just hang out in a in a virtual world on a on a screen but my brain and then the physical 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 Hank there might be some non player characters and these are in these virtual worlds that have simulated cognitive systems of certain kinds that dictate their behavior but you know mostly they're pretty simple right now I mean some people are trying to combine put a bit of AI and then non-player characters to make them to make them 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 now we think the mind is somehow 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 if when anyone anyone exercises agency in a video game and you know that'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 get 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 were 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 would be kind of a VR into a virtual world internal intelligence and then the question is could they have consciousness experience intelligence free will yes all the things that we have and again my view is I don't see why not to linger in a little bit I find virtual reality really incredibly powerful just even the crude virtual reality we have now perhaps there's a there's a psychological effects that's makes some people more amenable to virtual worlds and others but I find myself wanting to stay in virtual worlds for free yes with a headset or on a desktop no with a headset really interesting because I I am totally addicted yet using the internet and things on a 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 an oculus quest an HTC vive and Samsung listen that I want to stay in now for extended periods use you actually find yourself the something about him it's a both a combination of just imagination and considering the possibilities of where this goes in in the future it feels like I want to almost prepare my brain for like it I want to explore sort of Disneyland when it's first being built in the early days yeah and it feels like I'm 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 can open up that skull what are you gonna find sorry nothing there nothing the brain is elsewhere you don't think it's possible to kind of separate them and I don't mean in a sense like decart like a hard separation but basically do you think it's possible with the brain outside of the virtual grid when you're wearing a headset create a new consciousness for prolonged periods of time really feel like really experience forget that human brain is outside so this is okay this is gonna be the case where the brain is still outside still outside but could living in the VR I mean I mean we already find this right with video games exactly 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 it's very immersive you don't you don't forget the external world no exactly so if that's what I'm asking yeah it's almost possible to really forget the external world really really immerse yourself what to forget completely why would we forget you know we got pretty good memories maybe you can stop paying attention to the external world but you know that this already happens a lot I go to work and maybe I'm not paying attention to my home life if I go to s I go to a movie and I'm immersed in that so that degree of emotion 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 s but it's to make your brain do that possible so I mean I guess I'm getting at is consciousness a truly a property that's tied to the the physical brain or can it 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 interact for the physical world plays a video game puts on a video headset interacts with this virtual world and I think we typically say there's one consciousness here that nonetheless undergoes different environments takes on different characters you know in different environments this is already something that happens in the non virtual world you know I might interact one way in my home life work life social life and so on so at the very least that will happen in a in a virtual world very naturally people might people have very people sometimes adopt the character of avatars very different from themselves maybe even a different gender or different race different social background so that much is certainly possible I would see that as a single consciousness is singing on different personas if you want literal splitting of consciousness into multiple copies I think it's gonna take something more radical than that like maybe you can run different simulations of your brain in different realities and then expose them to different histories and then you know you just put yourself into 10 different simulated copies which then undergo different environments and then ultimately do become 10 very different consciousness maybe that could happen but now we're not talking about something that's possible in the near term we're gonna 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 which are not it's still connected to 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 and have inhabiting different environments and in a non virtual world so you said as a child you were a music color Senna famously synesthete so we're songs had colors for you so what songs had what colors you know this is funny um I didn't paint much attention to this at the time but I've listened to a piece of music and I'd get some kind of imagery of a of a kind of a kind of color of the wid thing is mostly they were okay murky dark greens and olive browns and the colors went all that interesting I don't know what the reason is I mean my theory is that maybe it's like different cords and tones provided different colors and the old tended to get mixed together into these somewhat uninteresting browns and greens but every now and then there'd be something that had a really pure color so this just a few that I did I remember it was a here there and everywhere by the Beatles was bright red and has this you know very distinctive tonality and it's chord structure at the at the beginnings of that right red it was a song by the Alan Parsons Project called ammonia Avenue that was it was kind of a pure a pure blue anyway I've got no idea how would this happen 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 with it like was blue associate with a positive and red with a negative or is it simply the perception of color associate with some characteristic of the song for me I don't remember a lot of association with with emotion or what the value was just this kind of weird and interesting fact I mean at the beginning I thought this was something that happened to everyone songs have colors maybe I mentioned it once or twice and people said no no ed it was like I thought was kind of cool when there was one that had one of these especially pure colors but only much later once I became a grad student thinking about the mind that I read about this phenomenon called synesthesia it's like hey that's what I had and now I occasionally talk about it in my classes in intro class and 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 they want to run away at age 20 or so and the you have a journal entry from around and saying songs don't have colors anymore what happened what happened yeah I was definitely sad that it was gone in retrospect there's 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 sets of experiences that you no longer have mm-hmm or deed 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 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 it has colors some people whenever they hear music it's got a it's got a certain really rich color pattern and you know for some synesthetes it's absolutely central I think if they lost it they'd be devastated again for me it was a very very mild form of synesthesia it's like yeah it's like those interesting experiences yeah you know you might get under different altered states of consciousness and and so on it's kind of cool but you know not necessarily the single most important experiences in your life so let's try to go to the very simplest question the events are bring you time but perhaps the simplest things can help us reveal even in time some 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 has 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 am 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 of 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 suggested 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 a lot of consciousness is the experience of those of those those qualities of consciousness is big the entirety of any kinds of extraneous of thinking is not obviously qualia it's not like specific qualities like redness or greenness but still I'm thinking about my hometown I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do later on maybe there's still something running through my 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 and 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 the 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 try on the face of it you have all this big complicated physical system in a brain running and without a given subjective experience at all and yet we do have subjective experience so the hard problem is just explained that explain how that comes about we haven't been able to build machines work a red light goes on that says it's not conscious so how does 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 you know we create babies yes that our that our conscious take out these brains asbestos brain does produce consciousness but even me even though we can't create it we still don't understand when 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 our 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 know you just made me realize for a second maybe it's a totally dumb realization but nevertheless that it's a useful way to think about the creation consciousness is looking at a baby so that there's a certain point at which that baby is not conscious mm-hmm something sort of the baby starts from maybe I don't I don't know from a few cells right 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 we do create consciousness again a really dumb thing for me to say but it not until now that I realized we do engineer consciousness we we get to watch the process happen we don't know which point it happens or where it is but you know 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 you know be incredibly cruel yeah of course of course babies feel pain and now the dominant view is that the babies can feel pain I actually my partner of Claudia works on this whole issue of whether there's consciousness and babies and of what kind and she certainly thinks that newborn babies you know come into the world with some degree of consciousness because then you could just extend the question backwards to fetuses suddenly are too politically controversial exactly territory but you know there the question also arises in the animal kingdom you know what where does consciousness start or stop is there a line in the animal kingdom where you know the first conscious organisms aren't 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 show a 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 you know who knows where it's gonna end the far end of this chain is the view that every physical system has some degree of consciousness philosophers call that pen sarcasm you know I take that view I mean that's a fascinating way to view reality so you could talk about if you can linger on pan psychism for a little bit what what does it mean it's not just plants are conscious I mean it's that consciousness is a fundament the 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 like why 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 in space and time evolved 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 happen with Maxwell ended up with fundamental principles of electromagnetism and took charge as fundamental because 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 instead of trying to explain consciousness wholly in terms of the evolution of space-time and and mass and so on take it as a primitive and then connected to everything else by some fundamental laws because I mean there's basic 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 strike they give us a complicated structure and dynamics they 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 existing physics is going to give you a full explanation of that certainly trying to get a physics view of consciousness yes there there has to be a connecting point and it could be at the very exome attic at the very beginning level but first of all there's a crazy idea that sort of everything has properties of consciousness there's a would at that point the word consciousness is already beyond the region 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 experience and the experiences that we have that I have as a human being it to say that everything is cautious that means that means there that basically another way to put that if if that's true then we understand almost nothing about that ask fundamental aspect of the world how do you feel about saying an ant is conscious to get the same reaction to the head or is that something you can understand I can understand ant I can't understand an atom applying chol plant so I'm comfortable with living things on earth mm-hmm being cautious because there's some kind of agency where there's 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 I'm not like I don't believe actually that plants are conscious of that plant suffer but I can understand that kind of belief that kind of idea how do you feel how do you feel about robots like the kind of robots we have now if I told you like that you know a Roomba at some degree of consciousness or some you know deep neural network I could understand that a Roomba has coasters I just had spent all day at iRobot I and I mean I personally love robots and have a deep connection with robots so I can I also probably enterpreneur Faiz them there's something about the physical object so this difference than a neural network then you'll 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 and moves in a way that it 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 some agency some consciousness so but to say that Pan psychism that conscious is a fundamental property of reality is a much bigger statement mm-hmm that it it's like Turtles all the way - yeah every is it doesn't end and the whole thing is so like how I know it's full mystery but if you can linger on it and I go how would it how do you think about reality if consciousness is a fundamental part of its fabric the way you get there some thinking can we explain consciousness given the existing fundamentals and then if you current is 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 that's called a proto consciousness or x-ray and then it turns out space-time mass plus X will somehow collectively give you the possibility for for consciousness we don't rule out that view either I call that pan proto psychism because maybe there's a 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 this somehow gives you consciousness but if we are not playing along with the idea that there really is genuine consciousness at the level of course this is gonna be way out and speculative but you know at least in say if it was classical physics then we'd have to end up saying well every little half every with you 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 worried 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 can't sing in itself so here's a view the nature in itself of a particle is something mental a particle is actually a conscious a little conscious subject with with properties of its consciousness to correspond to its physical properties the laws of physics are actually ultimately relating these properties of conscious subjects on this view a Newtonian world 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 of course that's a vastly speculative you know what no particular reason think is correct furthermore non Newtonian physics say a quantum mechanical wave function suddenly a sort of difference on a vast collection of conscious subjects may be the is ultimately one big wave function for the whole universe corresponding to that might be something more like as a single conscious mind whose structure corresponds to the structure of the wave function people sometimes call this cosmos sarcasm 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 there I am at the level of particles and with quantum mechanics at the level of the wavefunction it's a it's kind of an exciting beautiful possibility of course way out of reach of physics currently it is interesting that some neuroscientists our act begins to take pen psychism seriously you find consciousness even in very in very simple systems so for example the integrated information theory of consciousness a lot of neuroscientists are taking seriously actually I just got this new book by Christophe cook just came in the feeling of life itself my consciousness is widespread but can't be computed he likes he basically endorses a pen Sarkis view where you get consciousness with the degree of information processing or integrated information processing in a simple 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 the it's not just philosophy that might lead you in this direction but there are ways of thinking quasi scientifically that leads you there too but maybe different than pen psychism what do you think so Allen Watts has this quote I'd like to ask you about the quote is through our eyes the universe is perceiving itself through our ears universe is listening to its harmonies we are the witnesses to which the universe becomes conscious of his glory of its magnificence so that's not pants psychism 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 penstock ism then there was some little degree of consciousness at the bottom level all along and we were just more complex form of consciousness so I think maybe the quote you mentioned works better if you're not a pen Sarkis you're not a Cosmo Sarkis do you think consciousness just exists at this at this intermediate level and of course that's the Orthodox view that you would say is the the common useless is your own view with pan psychism a rarer view I think it's generally regarded certainly as a speculative view held by a fairly small minority of at least theorists philosophers most philosophers and most scientists who think about consciousness are not pants artists 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 is totally batshit crazy to use the technical term the philosophical ter so the Orthodox view I think is still consciousness is something that humans have and some good number of non-human animals have and maybe a eyes might have one day but it's restricted on that view then there was no consciousness at the start of universe there may be none at the end but it is this thing which happened at some point in the history of the universe consciousness developed and yes it's on 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 we are for this teleological view of evolution toward consciousness saying this let the problems for Darwinism it's got a mountain you know so it's very very controversial most people didn't agree I don't myself agree with this teleological view but it is a it's at least a beautiful speculative view love the of the cosmos what do you think people experience what do they seek when they believe in God from this kind of perspective mm-hmm I'm not an expert on thinking about God and religion I'm not myself religious at all when people sort of pray communicate with God word at which whatever form I'm not speaking to sort of the practices and the rituals non religion I mean the actual experience of that people really have a deep connection of God in some cases mhm 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 or or prayer and so on neuroscientists have tried to examine what bits of the brain are active and so on but yeah that is this deeper question of what is what are people looking for when they're doing this and like I said but no real expertise on this but it does seem the 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 and maybe the thought is if there is a God and God somehow is a universal consciousness who has invested this universe with meaning and some our connection to God might give your life meaning I got so I can kind of see the see the attractions of that but it still makes me wonder why is it exactly that a universal consciousness you know God would be needed to give the lot to give the world if I mean if universal consciousness can give the world meaning why can't local consciousness give the world meaning to so I think my consciousness gives my world is the meaning is the origin of meaning vary your world yeah 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 this universe meaning here we are local creatures with our own subjective experiences I think we can give the universe meaning ourselves so I mean maybe just some people that feels inadequate yeah 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 the you know it's a really interesting idea that consciousness is the thing that makes life meaningful if you could maybe just just briefly explore that for a second so I suspect just from listening to you know you mean in an almost trivial sense just the day-to-day experiences of life have because of you attached identity to it mm-hmm they become oh I guess I want to ask something I I would always wanted to ask College it Rock world renowned philosopher what is the meaning of life but I suspect you don't mean consciousness gives any kind of greater meaning to it all yeah 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 my view of the meaning of life but I wouldn't say consciousness self 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 and say intellectual work like understanding then that's your 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 and 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 you on this view there's no universal solution you know 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 having given 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 you know about the older the old trolley problem do you you kill one person or do you switch to the other track to kill kill Fievel I got a variant on this their zombie trolley problem where there's one conscious being on on one track and five humanoid zombies let's make them robots yeah who are not who are not conscious on the on the other track do you given that choice you kill the one conscious being or the five unconscious robots most people have a fairly clear intuition here yeah kill the kill the unconscious beings because they basically they don't have a meaningful life they're not really persons conscious beings of course we don't have good intuition about something like an unconscious being so in philosophical terms you refer to as Azzam mm-hmm 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 yes 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 mirror 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 were 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 that's not so far out we've got simple computer systems these tending in that direction now and presumably this is gonna get more and more sophisticated over years to come where we may have some pretty it's 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 we've cost there's this tricky question of how you would know whether they're conscious but let's say we've somehow solved 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 like what is moral status means does basically society can they suffer doesn't matter how we treat them I would for example if we if I mistreat this glass this cup by uh by shattering it then that's bad well why is it bad that was kind of make a mess it's gonna be annoying for me in my partner and so it's not bad for the cup no one would say the cup itself has moral state hey you you heard the cup and that's that's doing it a moral harm likewise plants will again if they're not conscious most people think if by operating 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 we're so we don't think we're we're morally harming Alexa by turning her off or disconnecting her or even destroying her whether it's the system or the or the underlying software system because we don't really think she's conscious on the other hand you moved to it like the the disembodied being in the moving in the movie her Samantha I guess she was kind of presented as conscious and then if you if you destroyed her you'd certainly be committing a serious harm so I think how strong senses if a being is conscious and can undergo subjective experiences that are 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 and it 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 to think about this stuff seriously including people to 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 that where we have to take them into account in thinking morally about how we act and systems for which we don't and I think I've seen you the writer talked about the demonstration of consciousness from a system like that from a system like Alex or a conversational agent that is what you would be looking for it's 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 sudden realize you don't have a body and yet you would feel what you're feeling you would probably say those kinds of things mm-hmm so do you think a system essentially becomes conscious by convincing us that it's conscious hmm through the words that I just mentioned so by being confused about the fact that why am I having these experiences well so basically I don't think this is what makes your 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 a 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 are puzzled by their consciousness animals don't seem to be puzzled at all I still think they're conscious but I 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 will help convince me that an AI system is consciousness if it shows signs of it if it shows signs of introspectively recognizing something like consciousness and finding this philosophically puzzling and the way that the way that that we do the incision interesting thought though because a lot of people sort of would at the shower level criticize the Turing test for language that it's essentially what I heard like Dan Dennett criticized it in this kind of way which is it's really puts a lot of emphasis on lying yeah and being able to being able to imitate human beings yeah there's this a there's this cartoon of the AI system studying for the Turing test it's gotta be this book called talk like a human like man I don't have to waste my time learning how to imitate humans maybe the AI system is gonna be way beyond the hard problem of consciousness and it's gotta be this thing why do I need to waste my time pretending that I recognize the 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 a 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 consciousness but is basically the thing demonstrates the illusion of consciousness that we can never really know whether it's conscious or not and in fact that almost feels like it doesn't matter them or does it still matter to you that something is conscious or it demonstrates consciousness you still see that fundamental distinction I think a lot of people whether our system is conscious or not matters hugely for many things like how we treat it cannot 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 the 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 state so I just talked 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 gonna seem like a strange form of racism or speciesism or somehow not to acknowledge them and actually we believe that by the way I believe that there is going to be something akin to the civil rights movement but for robots mm-hmm I think the moment you have a Roomba say please don't kick me that hurts just say it yeah I think they will fundamentally change the fabric of our society I think you're probably right although it's gonna be very tricky because just say where we've got the technology where these conscious beings can just be moderated and multiplied by the thousands by flicking a switch so and the legal status is gonna be different but ultimately the moral status ought to be the same and yeah the civil rights issue is gonna be a huge mess so if one day somebody clones you another very real possibility in fact I find the conversation between two copies of David Chalmers quite interesting every thought he's not making any sense so what do you think he would be cautious I do think he would be conscious I do think in some sense not sure 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 you know way have the same moral status it'll be wrong to hurt either of them or they kill them and so on still there's some sense in which probably their legal status would have to be different if I am the original and that one's just a clone then you're creating a clone of me presumably the clone doesn't for example automatically own the stuff that I own or you know I've got a you know certain connect the things that the people I interact with my family my partner and so on and I'm gonna somehow be connected to them in a way in which the clone isn't so because you came slightly first yeah but this alone would argue yeah they have really as much of a connection they have all the memories of that connection then away you might say it's kind of 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 or why she didn't leave you that's the original it's an interesting philosophical question but you might say because I actually have this history if I am the same person there's a one that came before and the clone is not that I have this history that the clone doesn't because there's also the question isn't the clone the same person - this is the 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 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 teletransport 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 Isis there's only one left around and only very occasionally two things go wrong and you get two copies of Captain Kirk it's somehow our legal system at the very least is gonna have to sort out some of these issues and that maybe that's what's moral and watch League what's legally acceptable are gonna come apart what question would you ask a clone of yourself yeah is there something useful II you can find out from him about the fundamentals of cautiousness even I mean kind of in principle I know that if it's a perfect clone it's gonna behave just like me so I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to I could discover whether it's a perfect clone by seeing whether it answers like me but otherwise I know what I'm gonna 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 be really convincing evidence should be the film of my being cloned and then all wrapped here being here and and waking up so you proved to me I'm a criminal yeah okay I would find that shocking and who knows how I would react to this so so maybe by talking to the clone I'd find something about my own psychology but 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 gonna 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 is consciousness and the way it reacts to things in general is like me and you know that will occupy us for a it's a basic unit unit testing in the early model yeah so you so if it's a perfect clone you say there's gonna be --have exactly like you so that takes us to freewill mmm-hmm is there a free will are we able to make decisions that are not predetermined from the initial conditions in the universe you know philosophers do this annoying thing of saying it depends what you mean so in this case yeah really depends on what you mean by by freewill if you mean something which was not determined in advance could never have been determined then I don't know we have freewill I mean there's quantum mechanics and who's to say if that opens up some room but I'm not sure we have freewill in that sense I'm also not sure that's the kind of freewill that really matters you know 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 method we've got the sense of actions that we are responsible for versus ones that were not I think you can make those distinctions even in a deterministic universe and this is what people call the compatibilist view of freewill where it's compatible with determinism I think for many purposes the kind of freewill 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 freewill of that kind if you mean super-duper freewill the ability to violate the laws of physics and doing things that imprints of all could not be predicted I don't know maybe no one has that kind of freewill what's the connection between the the reality of freewill and the experience of it the subjective experience in your view so how does consciousness connect to this to the experience to the reality in the experience of feels certainly true that when we make decisions and when we choose and so on we feel like we have an open future yes 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 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 somehow picking out one path from many paths were previously open and you might think that actually if we're in a deterministic universe there's a sense in 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 decisions were our experience of making a decision as choosing a path for 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 our self in making a decision experience of what's going on doesn't terribly well mirror what's uh what's going on I mean you know maybe there are antecedents in the brain way before anything came into consciousness and and and so on those aren't represented in our introspective models so in general our experience of our experience of perception yes I experienced perceptual image of the external world it's not a terribly good model of what's actually going on in the in my visual cortex and so on which has all these layers and so on it's just one little snapshot of of one bit of that so in general yeah introspective models are very over 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 we but weeks the brain just has these introspective models of itself or oversimplifies everything and represents itself as having these special properties of consciousness thing it's a really simple way to kind of keep track of it so and so on and then on The Illusionist view yeah that's just a that's just an illusion it was I find this view I find it implausible I do find it very attractive in some ways because it's easy 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 yourself I mean it's similar way when we perceive the external world we perceive it as having these colors that maybe it doesn't really have because that's a really useful way of keeping tracks of keeping track did you say that you find it not very plausible because I I thought I find it both plausible and attractive in some sense because it I mean that's 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 you know it is four it is very attractive I recently wrote an article all about this kind of issue called the meta problem of consciousness the hard problem is how does the brain give you consciousness the meta problem is why are we puzzled by the hard problem of consciousness and because you know I'll 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 meta problem 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 are attributed itself these special properties so that that meta problem is a resource fasten gram 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 Israel is just these these 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 Pam sake as I'm crazy in one way people find illusionism crazy in another way but it's I mean but it so yes it has to deny this fundamental datum of our existence now and the view that makes the view soar frankly unbelievable for most people on the other hand the view develop right might be able to explain why we find it unbelievable because these modal's are so deeply hop right into our head and they're all integrated so it's not you can't escape that the the illusion and as the 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 the including me here today are not real in in that sense they're all part of an illusion inside of Dave Chalmers whose head I think all this could be a simulation no but not just a simulation yeah because the simulation kind of is outside of you I mean what if it's all an illusion they yes a dream that you are experiencing that's it's all in your mind right thank you is that can you take illusionism that far well there's illusionism about the external world and illusionism about consciousness and these might go in respective different illusionism about the external world kind of takes you back to Descartes and yet could all this be produced by an evil demon they caught 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 so my attitude is that just as when a car 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 is being real it just tells us what the world is made of black white if it's a dream it could turn out that all this is like my dream created by my brain and the next universe up my own view is that wouldn't stop this physical world from being real 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 pants sarcasm about reality but it wouldn't show that the cup isn't real but 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 then it's right by the way perhaps you have an interesting thought about it why is there cards demon or genius considered evil what couldn't have been a benevolent one I had the same powers yeah I mean Dakota the Malheur genie the evil genie or evil genius malign I guess was the word but it's interesting question I mean a later philosophy Berkeley said no in fact all this is done by God God actually supply supplies you all of these all of these perceptions and ideas and that's how physical reality is sustained interestingly Barclays God is doing something that doesn't look so different from what des cartes evil demon was doing it's just that they can't thought it was deception and Berkeley thought it was not and I'm I'm actually most sympathetic to Berkeley here yeah this evil demon may be trying to deceive you but I think okay well the evil demon may just be under the working under a false philosophical theory is 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 know if we're in a matrix it's all still it's all still real yeah the the philosopher ok booster I had a nice story about this about 50 years ago about dick Hart's evil demon where he said this demon spends all its time trying to fool people but fails because I'm how old demon ends up doing is constructing realities for 4 people so yeah I think that maybe if it's a very natural to take this view that if we're in a simulation or 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 well 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 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 of it we're already gotten very used to that from for modern science see you've kind of looted that you don't have to have consciousness for high levels of intelligence but to create truly general intelligent systems ági systems at human level intelligence and perhaps superhuman level intelligence you've talked about that it you feel like that kind of thing might be very far away but nevertheless one we reached that point do you think consciousness from an engineering perspective is needed or at least highly beneficial for creating in the a GI 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 still 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 fists ocation are possible for all of our cognitive functions and more my inclination is to think that once you've got all these cognitive functions you know perception attention reasoning introspection language emotion and so on it's very likely you'll have you'll have consciousness as well as this is very hard for me to see how you'd have a system 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 that's so you can't disentangle them even when you're in us but we don't know what caused a 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 that all we might find someplace where it actually makes a difference and we could say uh here is where in collapsing wave functions it's driving the behavior of a system and maybe it could even turn out that for a GI 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 affect 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 have had I don't myself find that plausible I think probably that functionality could be simulated 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 a GIS and if it was a role that could not be duplicated elsewhere then we have to find we did we 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 whatever worries about X sensual threats of conscious intelligent beings that are not us though so certainly I'm sure you're worried about us yeah 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 that eventually we're replaced by some artificial beings around 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 that's not so bad that's just our successors 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 and many people think that yeah once you get to humans and AI is an amazing sophistication where everyone has got the the ability to create weapons that can destroy the whole universe just by just by pressing a button then maybe it's inevitable all intelligent life will will die out that would be a that would certainly be a disaster and we've got to think very hard about how to avoid that but yeah another interesting kind of disaster is that may be intelligent life is not wiped out but all consciousness is wiped out so 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 some which are not and just say it turns out that we create AGI with with higher degree of intelligence meaning higher degree of sophistication and that's behavior but with no consciousness at all that AGI could take over the world maybe but then there be but let there be no consciousness in this world this would be a world of zombies some people have called this the zombie apocalypse because it's consciousness consciousness is gone you've merely got this / intelligent non-conscious robots and 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 from that world so 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 so I hope that's not gonna happen but of course I don't understand consciousness no one understands consciousness this is one reason for 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 with a you know city in a world with humans and or AI how do you feel about the possibility of consciousness so naturally does come with a GI systems that we are just a step in the evolution that will be just something a blimp on the record that be studied in books by the a GI systems centuries from now I mean I think I'd probably be ok with that especially if somehow humans are continuous with AG eyes I mean I think something like this is inevitable the very least humans are gonna be transformed we're gonna be augmented by technology that's already happening in all kinds of ways we're gonna be transformed by technology where our brains are gonna be uploaded and computationally enhanced and eventually that line between what's a human and what's a what's an AI maybe kind of hard to 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 kind of point to its cognitive system to point to some past that had some roots in us and chaser trace a continuous line there that would be selfishly nice for me to think that ok I'm connected to this thread line through the future of the world but if it turns out ok there's a jump there they'd if they found a better way to design cognitive systems they designed a wholly new kind of thing and the only line is some causal chain of designing and systems that design better systems is that so much worse I don't know 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 at least we were part of the process it'll be nice if they still cared enough about us to you know maybe to engage with our arguments I'm really hoping that the Agis are gonna solve all the problems of philosophy they'll come back and read all this all this crap for the 20th and 21st century hard problem of consciousness and here is why they got it wrong and so and if that happened then I'd really feel like I was part of at least a 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 philosophy a car the garden and just put them in a room he's just watch it'll be a Netflix of the future show will you bring philosophers from different human 100% human philosophers from previous generations put them in a room and see them I am totally I'm totally up for that simulators AG eyes of the future if you're watching who that would like to be recreated and who wouldn't be cut with the car it would be the first hangout as part of such a TV show with a philosopher that's no longer with us from long ago who would it who would you choose dick count would have to be right up there oh actually a couple of months ago I got to have a conversation with dick Hart an actor who's actually a philosopher came out on stage playing Descartes I didn't know this was gonna happen and I just after I gave a talk and a bit of a surreal my ideas were crap and all drive from him and so I made along with a long argument this was great no I would love to see what Descartes would think about AI for example and modern neuroscience and so on I suspect not too much would surprise him but that ya William James you know for psychologists of consciousness I think James was probably the was probably the the richest but oh there are manual cars you know I never really understood when is up to if I got to actually talk to him about some of this hey it was Princess Elizabeth who talked with Descartes and who really you know got other problems of how they carts ideas of a non-physical mind interacting with the with the 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 feature so we talked about was 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 maybe one day we'll have degrees of consciousness maybe be able to upload brains all those possibilities virtual reality what is there a particular aspect of 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 half us like yeah we've had some progress lately an 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 50s 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 are 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 replace my neurons with silicon chips and I'd have it like a few selfishly that would be that would be wonderful I suspect I'm not going to quite get there in a in my lifetime but once that's possible then you've got the possibility of transforming your consciousness in remarkable ways or renting it enhancing it so let me ask them 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 would be awful to be a to be immortal be so boring or something I don't see I really don't see a 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 you know if the universe is gonna go on forever or indefinitely it's going to continue to be interesting it I don't think yeah your view was that we just hit this one romantic point of interest now and afterwards it's all gonna be boring super-intelligent stasis I guess my vision is more like no it's gonna continue to be infinitely interesting something like as you go up the set theoretic hierarchy you know you go from the the finite car finite Cardinals to Aleph zero and then through there to all the Aleph one and I love two and maybe the continuum and you keep taking power sets and you know 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 vision of the future that's my optimistic vision of the future of superintelligence it will keep expanding and keep growing but still being fundamentally unpredictable at many points I mean yes this gets creates all kinds of worries like couldn't it all be fragile and be destroyed at any point so we're gonna 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 part 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 the future where you get to argue with Descartes perhaps for all eternity so David 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 sponsored cash app download it use coal XPath cast you'll get ten dollars and ten dollars will go to first an organization that inspires and educates young minds to become science and technology innovators of tomorrow if you enjoyed this podcast subscribe on youtube give it five stars an apple podcast follow on Spotify supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter and lex friedman 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 you