According to John Searle, intelligence requires consciousness. Any system that achieves seemingly intelligent results is simply a calculator without the experience of meaning, which in turn requires the consciousness of the external observer to assign it that meaning. It might be interesting to get him on, but even for a show like this, which bridges many disciplinary gaps, it might be that technical academic philosophy is a bridge too far. But I can't share the larmoyance; I'm sure the hard problem of consciousness will not be "solved" to the standards of what philosophy considers "solved" in the remaining decades of my life - though I've no doubt we will have no problem creating rebuilds of mitosis, mitosoid processes, that create conscious beings. But I don't think the problem will be solved ever. Solving it is not possible any more than any other "why" question can be exhaustively answered. <br><br>Regarding DEATH experience: I used to have the same image about it, it somehow seems more grandiose, more dramatic, more doing justice to the experience of life. However, in NDEs, even if they are illusionary, usually are very undramatic. It doesn't seem like your last moments of saying goodbye to this life is very dramatic and melancholic. Earth life usually seems very short and insignificant by comparison to what's next, and whomever you lose, you will have the experience - illusionary or not - that they are just a tiny moment away from stepping out and meeting up with you again. Again, this is lacking the dramatic momentum I have always associated with death, but that seems to be the nigh universal farewell experience. <br><br>Additionally, isn't it interesting? The terror of the black hole, the terror of being alone at the furthest lonesome star in the universe, it goes away when you think about that death never left you, right? It's the one familiar door that's opens from any place and presumably leads to the same place, no matter where you go through it. The black hole can't eat you and suck you into its yawning abyss, a maelstrom, a graveyard of a thousand stars, to torment and churn you in that dark loneliness forever. No. Even this cosmic horror beyond all human scale leads to the same place as a traffic accident - you just die. It's the most merciful thing in the universe, that the greatest of terrors to an immortal being scale down to something mundane for us mortal humans. If we were a bit more sturdy and would have survived a million years of aging, accidents, diseases and violence, then the Great Attractor might make us tremble in our boots. But we can face that terror, because that terror is, to us, no greater than a mundane, every-day event: a traffic accident, or cancer. A tragedy, but a mundane one. It doesn't end a million years of valor. It's just one way among many for a human may-fly to be swatted into the unknown night or light beyond the world. <br><br>Of course, who knows, there might be things out there that are so strange and transformative that they, in fact, do lead to still stranger issues than death. But so far, there is no indication of that.