The following is a conversation with David Chalmers.
He's a philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind,
philosophy of language, and consciousness.
He's perhaps best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness,
which could be stated as,
Why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?
Consciousness is almost entirely a mystery.
Many people who worry about AI safety and ethics
believe that, in some form, consciousness can and should be engineered into AI systems of the future.
So while there's much mystery, disagreement, and discoveries yet to be made about consciousness,
these conversations, while fundamentally philosophical in nature,
may nevertheless be very important for engineers of modern AI systems to engage in.
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcasts,
support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter,
at Lex Freedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N.
As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now,
and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation.
I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store.
When you get it, use code Lex Podcast.
Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin,
and invest in the stock market with as little as $1.
Brokerage services are provided by Cash App Investing,
Subsidery of Square, and Member SIPC.
Since Cash App does fractional share trading,
let me mention that the order execution algorithm that works behind the scenes
to create the abstraction of fractional orders is an algorithmic marvel.
So big props to the Cash App engineers for solving a hard problem
that in the end provides an easy interface that takes a step up
to the next layer of abstraction over the stock market,
making trading more accessible for new investors and diversification much easier.
If you get Cash App from the App Store, 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 that is 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 the big one is, how do we know anything about the external world?
Descartes said, maybe you're being fooled by an evil demon
who's stimulating your brain and thinking, all this stuff is real when, in fact, it's all made up.
Well, the modern version of that is, how do you know you're not in a simulation?
And then the thought is, if you're in a simulation, none of this is real.
So that's teaching you something about knowledge.
How do you know about the external world?
I think there's also really interesting questions about the nature of reality right here.
If we are in a simulation, is all this real?
Is there really a table here? Is there really a microphone?
Do I really have a body?
The standard view would be, no, we don't.
None of this would be real.
My view is actually that's wrong.
And even if we are in a simulation, all of this is real.
That's why I call this reality 2.0, new version of reality,
different version of reality, still reality.
So what's the difference between quote unquote, real world and the world that we perceive?
So we interact with the world by perceiving it.
It only really exists through the window of our perception system and in our mind.
So what's the difference between something that's quote unquote real,
that exists perhaps without us being there and the world as you perceive it?
Well, the world as we perceive it is a very simplified and distorted
version of what's going on underneath.
We already know that from just thinking about science.
You don't see too many obviously quantum mechanical effects
and what we perceive, but we still know quantum mechanics is going on under all things.
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.
And we know that's what the philosopher Wilfred Sellers called the manifest image.
The world as it seems to us, we already know underneath all that is a very different scientific
image with atoms or quantum wave functions or super strings or whatever the latest thing is.
And that's the ultimate scientific reality.
So I think of the simulation idea as basically another hypothesis about what the ultimate,
say quasi scientific or metaphysical reality is going on underneath the world or the manifest
image. The world of the manifest image is this very simple thing that we interact with that's
neutral on the underlying stuff of reality science can help tell us about that.
Maybe philosophy can help tell us about that too.
And if we eventually take the red pill and find out we're in a simulation,
my view is that's just another view about what reality is made of.
The philosopher Emmanuel Kant said, what is the nature of the thing in itself?
I've got a glass here and it's got all these, it appears to me a certain way, a certain shape,
it's liquid, it's clear. He said, what is the nature of the thing in itself?
Well, I think of the simulation idea, it's a hypothesis about the nature of the thing in
itself. It turns out if we're in a simulation, the thing in itself, nature of this glass,
it's okay, it's actually a bunch of data structures running on a computer in the next universe up.
Yeah, that's what people tend to do when they think about simulation.
They think about our modern computers and somehow trivially, crudely just scaled up in some sense.
But 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,
or something so big to simulate it? Does it get into this fuzzy area that's not useful at all?
Yeah, I mean, our universe is obviously incredibly complicated and for us within our universe to
build a simulation of a universe as complicated as ours is going to have obvious problems here.
If universe is finite, there's just no way that's going to work. Maybe there's some
a cute way to make it work if the universe is infinite. Maybe an infinite universe could somehow
simulate a copy of itself, but that's going to be hard. Nonetheless, just that we are in a simulation,
I think there's no particular reason why we have to think the simulating universe has to be anything
like ours. You've said before that it might be, so you could think of it in turtles all the way
down. You could think of the simulating universe different than ours, but we ourselves could also
create another simulating universe. So you said that there could be these levels of universes,
and you've also mentioned this hilarious idea, maybe tongue-in-cheek, maybe not, that there may
be simulations within simulations, arbitrarily stacked levels, and that we may be in level
42 along those stacks referencing H. Hacker's guide to the universe. If we're indeed in a
simulation within a simulation at level 42, what do you think level zero looks like?
I would expect that level zero is truly enormous. I mean, not just if it's finite at some
extraordinarily large finite capacity, much more likely it's infinite. Maybe it's got some very
high synthetic cardinalities that enables it to support just any number of simulations. So
high degree of infinity at level zero, slightly smaller degree of infinity at level one. So by
the time you get down to us at level 42, maybe plenty of room for lots of simulations of finite
capacity. If the top universe is only a small finite capacity, then obviously that's going
to put very, very serious limits on how many simulations you're going to be able to be able
to get running. So I think we can certainly confidently say that if we're at level 42, then
the top level is pretty damn big. So it gets more and more constrained as we get down levels, more
and more simplified and constrained and limited in resources. Yeah, we still have plenty of capacity
here. What was it? Feynman said he said there's plenty of room at the bottom. We're still a
number of levels above the degree where there's room for fundamental computing, physical computing
capacity, quantum computing capacity at the bottom level. So we got plenty of room to play with and
make. We probably have plenty of room for simulations of pretty sophisticated universes,
perhaps none as complicated as our universe, unless our universe is infinite, but still
at the very least for pretty serious finite universes, but maybe universes
somewhat simpler than ours, unless of course we're prepared to take certain shortcuts
in the simulation, which might then increase the capacity significantly.
Do you think the human mind, us people, in terms of the complexity of simulation is at the height
of what the simulation might be able to achieve? If you look at incredible entities that could be
created in this universe of ours, do you have an intuition about how incredible human beings are
on that scale? I think we're pretty impressive, but we're not that impressive.
Are we above average? I think human beings are at a certain point in the scale of
intelligence, which made many things possible. You get through evolution, through single cell
organisms, through fish and mammals and primates, and something happens
once you get to human beings. We've just reached that level where we get to develop language,
we get to develop certain kinds of culture, we get to develop certain kinds of collective thinking
that has enabled all this amazing stuff to happen, science and literature and engineering and
culture and so on. Still, we're just at the beginning of that on the evolutionary threshold.
It's kind of like we just got there, who knows, a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago,
so we're probably just at the very beginning for what's possible there. 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 simulation, then the simulators who created us have got the
capacity to be far more sophisticated. If we're at level 42, who knows what the ones at level zero
are like? It's also possible that this is the epitome of what is possible to achieve. We assume
a being, see ourselves maybe as flawed, see all the constraints, all the limitations,
but maybe that's the magical, the beautiful thing. Maybe those limitations are the essential elements
for an interesting sort of that edge of chaos, that interesting existence, that if you make us
much more intelligent, if you make us more powerful in any kind of dimension of performance,
maybe you lose something fundamental that makes life worth living. You kind of have this optimistic
view that we're this little baby, that there's so much growth and potential, but this could also be
it. This is the most amazing thing is us. Maybe what you're saying is consistent with what I'm
saying. I mean, we could still have levels of intelligence far beyond us, but maybe those
levels of intelligence on your view would be kind of boring. We kind of get so good at everything
that life suddenly becomes unidimensional. We're just inhabiting this one spot of maximal
romanticism in the history of evolution. You get to humans and it's like, yeah, years to come,
our super intelligent descendants are going to look back at us and say, those were the days
when they just hit the point of inflection and life was interesting. I am an optimist,
so I'd like to think that if there is super intelligence somewhere in the future, they'll
figure out how to make life super interesting and super romantic. Well, you know what they're
going to do. What they're going to do is they realize how boring life is when you're super
intelligent, so they create a new level of assimilation and live through the things they've
created by watching them stumble about in their flawed ways. Maybe that's, so you create a new
level of assimilation every time you get really bored with how smart and this would be kind of
sad though, because we showed the peak of their existence would be like watching simulations
for entertainment. That's like saying the peak of our existence now is Netflix. No, it's all right.
A flip side of that could be the peak of our existence for many people having children and
watching them grow. That becomes very meaningful. Okay, you create a simulation that's like creating
a family. Well, any kind of creation is kind of a powerful act. Do you think it's easier to simulate
the mind or the universe? So I've heard several people, including Nick Bossram, think about ideas
of maybe you don't need to simulate the universe. You can just simulate the human mind or in general,
the distinction between simulating the entirety of it, the entirety of the physical world,
or just simulating the mind. Which one do you see is more challenging? Well, I think in some sense,
the answer is obvious. It has to be simpler to simulate the mind than to simulate the universe
because the mind is part of the universe. In order to fully simulate the universe,
you're going to have to simulate the mind. So I'm just talking about partial simulations.
And I guess the question is, which comes first? Does the mind come before the universe or does
the universe come before the mind? So the mind could just be an emergent phenomena in this universe.
So simulation is an interesting thing. It's not like creating a simulation, perhaps,
requires you to program every single thing that happens in it. It's just defining a set
of initial conditions and rules based on which it behaves. Simulating the mind requires you to
have a little bit more. We're now in a little bit of a crazy lamp, but it requires you to understand
the fundamentals of cognition, perhaps of consciousness, of perception of everything
like that. That's not created through some kind of emergence from basic physics laws,
but more requires you to actually understand the fundamentals of the mind.
How about if we said to simulate the brain rather than the mind? The brain is just a big
physical system. The universe is a giant physical system. To simulate the universe,
at the very least, you're going to have to simulate the brains as well as all the other
physical systems within it. It's not obvious that the problems are any worse for the brain than for
it's a particularly complex physical system. But if we can simulate arbitrary physical systems,
we can simulate brains. There is this further question of whether, when you simulate a brain,
will that bring along all the features of the mind with it? Will you get consciousness? Will
you get thinking? Will you get free will? That's something philosophers have argued over for years.
My own view is if you simulate the brain well enough, that will also simulate the mind. But
yeah, there's plenty of people who would say, no, you'd merely get a zombie system, a simulation of
a brain without any true consciousness. But for you, you put together a brain,
the consciousness comes with it, a rise. Yeah. I don't think it's obvious.
That's your intuition. My view is roughly that, yeah, what is responsible for consciousness,
it's in the patterns of information processing and so on rather than, say, the biology that it's
made of. There's certainly plenty of people out there who think consciousness has to be, say,
biological. So if you merely replicate the patterns of information processing in a non-biological
substrate, you'll miss what's crucial for consciousness. I mean, I think just don't
think there's any particular reason to think that biology is special here. You can imagine
substituting the biology for non-biological systems, say, silicon circuits that play the
same role. The behavior will continue to be the same. And I think just to keep out,
what is the true, when I think about the connection, the isomorphisms between consciousness
and the brain, the deepest connections to me seem to connect consciousness to patterns of
information processing, not to specific biology. So I at least adopted as my working hypothesis
that basically it's the computation and the information that matters for consciousness.
At the same time, we don't understand consciousness. All this could be wrong.
So the computation, the flow, the processing, manipulation of information,
the process is where the consciousness, the software is where the consciousness comes from,
not the hardware. Roughly the software, yeah, the patterns of information processing,
at least in the hardware, which we can view as software. It may not be something you can just
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 at the level of implementation.
So on that, what do you think of the experience of self, just the experience of the world in a
virtual world, in virtual reality? Is it possible that we can create sort of offsprings of our
consciousness by existing in a virtual world long enough? So yeah, can we be conscious in
the same kind of deep way that we are in this real world by hanging out in a virtual world?
Yeah, well, the kind of virtual worlds we have now are interesting but limited in certain ways.
In particular, they rely on us having a brain and so on, which is outside the virtual world.
Maybe I'll strap on my VR headset or just hang out in a virtual world on a screen, but my brain
and then my physical environment might be simulated if I'm in a virtual world. But right now,
there's no attempt to simulate my brain. There might be some non-player characters
in these virtual worlds that have simulated cognitive systems of certain kinds that dictate
their behavior, but mostly they're pretty simple right now. I mean, some people are trying to
combine, put a bit of AI in their non-player characters to make them smarter. But for now,
inside virtual world, the actual thinking is interestingly distinct from the physics of
those virtual worlds. In a way, actually, I like to think this is kind of reminiscent of the way
that Descartes thought our physical world was. There's physics and there's the mind and they're
separate. Now we think the mind is somehow connected to physics pretty deeply. But in these
virtual worlds, there's a physics of a virtual world and then there's this brain which is totally
outside the virtual world that controls it and interacts it when anyone exercises agency
in a video game. It's actually somebody outside the virtual world moving a controller,
controlling the interaction of things inside the virtual world. So right now, in virtual worlds,
the mind is somehow outside the world. But you could imagine in the future, once we have developed
serious AI, artificial general intelligence, and so on, then we could come to virtual worlds
which have enough sophistication. You could actually simulate a brain or have a genuine AGI,
which would then presumably be able to act in equally sophisticated ways, maybe even more
sophisticated ways inside the virtual world to how it might in the physical world. And then the
question is going to come along. That would be kind of a VR, a virtual world internal intelligence.
And then the question is, could they have consciousness, experience, intelligence,
free will, all the things that we have? And again, my view is I don't see why not.
To linger on it a little bit, I find virtual reality really incredibly powerful, just even
the crude virtual reality we have now. Perhaps there's psychological effects that make some
people more amenable to virtual worlds than others, but I find myself wanting to stay in
virtual worlds for a while because, yes. With a headset or on a desktop?
No, with a headset. Really interesting because I am totally addicted to using the internet and
things on a desktop. But when it comes to VR for the headset, I don't typically use it for more
than 10 or 20 minutes. There's something just slightly aversive about it, I find. So I don't,
right now, even though I have Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest and HTC Vive and Samsung this and
that. I just don't want to stay in that world. Not for extended periods. You actually find yourself
thinking about it. It's both a combination of just imagination and considering the possibilities
of where this goes in the future. It feels like I want to almost prepare my brain for it. I want
to explore Disneyland when it's first being built in the early days. And it feels like walking
around almost imagining the possibilities and something through that process allows my mind
to really enter into that world. But you say that the brain is external to that virtual world.
It is strictly speaking true. But if you're in VR and you do brain surgery on an avatar and you're
going to open up that skull and what are you going to find? Sorry, nothing there. Nothing.
The brain is elsewhere. You don't think it's possible to kind of separate them.
And I don't mean in a sense like Descartes, like a hard separation. But basically, do you think it's
possible with the brain outside of the virtual RID when you're wearing a headset, create a new
consciousness for prolonged periods of time? Really feel like really experience, like forget
that your brain is outside. So this is okay. This is going to be the case where the brain is still
outside but could living in the VR. I mean, we already find this right with video games.
Exactly. They're completely immersive and you get taken up by living in those worlds and it
becomes your reality for a while. So they're not completely immersive. They're just very immersive.
You don't forget the external world. Exactly. So that's what I'm asking you. It's almost possible
to really forget the external world. Really, really immerse yourself.
To forget completely, why would we forget? We got pretty good memories. Maybe you can
stop paying attention to the external world. But this already happens a lot. I go to work and maybe
I'm not paying attention to my home life. I go to a movie and I'm immersed in that. So that degree
of immersion, absolutely. But we still have the capacity to remember it, to completely forget
the external world. I'm thinking that would probably take some, I don't know, some pretty serious drugs
or something to make your brain do that. It's impossible. So I mean, I guess I'm getting at
is consciousness truly a property that's tied to the physical brain? Or can you create different
offspring copies of consciousnesses based on the worlds that you enter?
Well, the way we're doing it now, at least with a standard VR, there's just one brain
interacts with the physical world, plays a video game, puts on a video headset,
interacts with this virtual world. And I think we'd typically say there's one
consciousness here that nonetheless undergoes different environments, takes on different
characters in different environments. This is already something that happens in the non-virtual
world. I might interact one way in my home life, my work life, social life, and so on. So at the
very least, that will happen in a virtual world very naturally. People have, people sometimes
adopt a character of avatars very different from themselves, maybe even a different gender,
different race, different social background. So that much is certainly possible. I would see that
as a single consciousness, as a seeking on different personas. If you want literal splitting
of consciousness into multiple copies, I think it's going to take something more radical
than that. Like maybe you can run different simulations of your brain and different realities
and then expose them to different histories. And then you'd split yourself into 10 different
simulated copies, which then undergo different environments. And then ultimately do become
10 very different consciousnesses. Maybe that could happen. But now we're not talking about
something that's possible in the near term. We're going to have to have brain simulations and AGI
for that to happen. Got it. So before any of that happens, it's fundamentally you see it as a
singular consciousness, even though it's experiencing different environments,
whether or not it's still connected to the same set of memories, same set of experiences, and
therefore one sort of joint conscious system. Yeah, or at least no more multiple than the kind
of multiple consciousness that we get from inhabiting different environments in a non-virtual
world. So you said as a child, you were a music color senate... Senate state. Senate state. So
where songs had colors for you? So what songs had what colors? You know, this is funny. I didn't
paint much attention to this at the time, but I'd listened to a piece of music and I'd get
some kind of imagery of a kind of color. The weird thing is mostly they were kind of
murky dark greens and olive browns and the colors weren't all that interesting. I don't know what
the reason is. I mean, my theory is that maybe it's like different chords and tones provided
different colors and they all tended to get mixed together into these somewhat uninteresting
browns and greens, but every now and then there'd be something that had a really pure color. So
this is the few that I remember that was here, there and everywhere by the Beatles was bright red
and has this very distinctive tonality and it's called structure at the beginning. So that was
bright red. There was this song by the Alan Parsons project called Ammonia Avenue that was
kind of a pure blue. Anyway, I've got no idea how would this happen. I didn't even pay that
much attention until it went away when I was about 20. I've seen this seizure often goes away.
So is it purely just the perception of a particular color or was there a positive or negative
experience? Like was blue associated with a positive and red with a negative? Or is it simply
the perception of color associated with some characteristic of the song?
For me, I don't remember a lot of association with emotion or with value. It was just this kind
of weird and interesting fact. I mean, at the beginning, I thought this was something that
happened to everyone, songs of colors. Maybe I mentioned it once or twice and people said, uh,
nope. I thought it was kind of cool when there was one that had one of these especially pure
colors, but only much later, once I became grad student thinking about the mind that I read
about this phenomenon called synesthesia. And it's like, Hey, that's what I had. And now I
occasionally talk about it in my classes, an intro class. And it still happens sometimes
a student comes up and says, Hey, I have that. I never knew about that. I never knew it had a name.
You said that it went away at age 20 or so. And that you have a journal entry from around
then saying songs don't have colors anymore. What happened? What happened? Yeah, I was definitely
sad that it was gone in retrospect. It'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 set of experiences that you no longer have.
Or do you, or is it just a nice thing to have had? You don't see them as that fundamentally
different than you visiting a new country and experiencing new environments.
I guess for me, when I had these experiences, they were somewhat marginal. They were like a
little bonus kind of experience. I know there are people who have much more serious forms of
synesthesia than this for whom it's absolutely central to their lives. I know people who,
when they experience new people, they have colors, maybe they have tastes. And so on,
every time they see writing, it has colors. Some people, whenever they hear music,
it's got a certain really rich color pattern. And for some synesthetes, it's absolutely
central. And I think if they lost it, they'd be devastated. Again, for me, it was a very,
very mild form of synesthesia. And it's like, yeah, it's like those interesting experiences.
You might get under different auto states of consciousness and so on. It's kind of cool.
But not necessarily the single most important experiences in your life.
Got it. So let's try to go to the very simplest question that you've answered many times. But
perhaps the simplest things can help us reveal even in time some new ideas. So what,
in your view, is consciousness? What is qualia? What is the hard problem of consciousness?
Consciousness. I mean, the word is used many ways, but the kind of consciousness that I'm
interested in is basically subjective experience. What it feels like from the inside to be a human
being or any other conscious being. I mean, there's something it's like to be me right now. I have
visual images that I'm experiencing. I'm hearing my voice. I've got maybe some emotional tone.
I've got a stream of thoughts running through my head. These are all things that I experience
from the first person point of view. I've sometimes called this the inner movie in the mind. It's not
a perfect metaphor. It's not like a movie in every way and it's very rich. But yeah, it's
just direct subjective experience. And I call that consciousness or sometimes philosophers use the
word qualia, which you suggest that people tend to use the word qualia for things like the qualities
of things like colors, redness, the experience of redness versus the experience of greenness,
the experience of one taste or one smell versus another, the experience of the quality of pain.
And yeah, a lot of consciousness is the experience of those qualities.
But consciousness is bigger, the entirety of any kind of experience.
I mean, consciousness of thinking is not obviously qualia. It's not like specific qualities like
redness or greenness. But still, I'm thinking about my hometown and I'm thinking about what I'm
thinking about what I'm going to do later on. Maybe there's still something running through my head
which is subjective experience. Maybe it goes beyond those qualities or qualia. Philosophers
sometimes use the word phenomenal consciousness for consciousness in this sense. I mean, people also
talk about access consciousness, being able to access information in your mind, reflective
consciousness, being able to think about yourself. But it looks like the really mysterious one,
the one that really gets people going is phenomenal consciousness. The fact that all this,
the fact that there's subjective experience and all this feels like something at all.
And then the hard problem is, how is it that, why is it that there is phenomenal consciousness
at all? And how is it that physical processes in a brain could give you subjective experience?
It looks like on the face of it, you'd have all this big complicated physical system in a brain
running without a given subjective experience at all. And yet we do have subjective experience.
So the hard problem is just explain that. Explain how that comes about. We haven't been able to
build machines where a red light goes on that says it's not conscious. So how do we actually
create that? Or how do humans do it? And how do we ourselves do it? We do every now and then
create machines that can do this. We create babies that are conscious. They've got these brains.
As best as we can tell. The brain does produce consciousness. But even though we can create it,
we still don't understand why it happens. Maybe eventually we'll be able to create machines,
which as a matter of fact, AI machines, which as a matter of fact, are conscious. But that
won't necessarily make the hard problem go away any more than it does with babies. Because we
still want to know how and why is it that these processes give you consciousness?
You just made me realize for a second, maybe it's a totally dumb realization.
But nevertheless, that it's a useful way to think about the creation of consciousness
is looking at a baby. So that there's a certain point at which that baby is not conscious.
The baby starts from maybe, I don't know, from a few cells. There's a certain point
at which it becomes consciousness arrives. It's conscious. Of course, we can't know exactly
that line. But that's a useful idea that we do create consciousness. Again, a really dumb thing
for me to say, but not until now that I realize we do engineer consciousness. We get to watch
the process happen. We don't know which point it happens or where it is. But we do see the birth
of consciousness. There's a question, of course, is whether babies are conscious when they're
born. And it used to be, it seems at least some people thought they weren't, which is why they
didn't give anesthetics to newborn babies when they circumcised them. And so now people think,
oh, that's incredibly cruel. Of course, babies feel pain. And now the dominant view is that
the babies can feel pain. Actually, my partner, Claudia, works on this whole issue of whether
there's consciousness in babies and of what kind. And she certainly thinks that newborn babies
come into the world with some degree of consciousness. Of course, then you can just
extend the question backwards to fetuses and suddenly you're into politically controversial
exactly territory. But, you know, 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 are? It's interesting. Over time, people are
becoming more and more liberal about describing consciousness to animals. People used to think,
maybe only mammals could be conscious. Now most people seem to think, sure, fish are conscious,
they can feel pain. And now we're arguing over insects. You'll find people out there who say,
plants have some degree of consciousness. So, you know, who knows where it's going to end.
The far end of this chain is the view that every physical system has some degree
of consciousness. Philosophers call that panpsychism. You know, I take that view.
I mean, that's a fascinating way to view reality. So if you could talk about,
if you can linger on panpsychism for a little bit, what does it mean? So it's not just plants
are conscious. I mean, it's that consciousness is a fundamental fabric of reality. What does
that mean to you? How do we supposed to think about that? Well, we're used to the idea that
some things in the world are fundamental, right? In physics, we take things like space or time or
space time, mass, charge as fundamental properties of the universe. You don't reduce them to something
simpler. You take those for granted. You've got some laws that connect them. Here is how mass and
space and time evolve theories like relativity or quantum mechanics or some future theory that
will unify them both. But everyone says you got to take some things as fundamental. And if you
can't explain one thing in terms of the previous fundamental things, you have to expand. Maybe
something like this happened with Maxwell. You end up with fundamental principles of electromagnetism
and took charge as fundamental because it turned out that was the best way to explain it. So I
at least take seriously the possibility something like that could happen with consciousness. Take
it as a fundamental property like space, time and mass. And instead of trying to explain consciousness
wholly in terms of the evolution of space, time and mass and so on, take it as a primitive and
then connect it to everything else by some fundamental laws. I mean, there's this basic
problem that the physics we have now looks great for solving the easy problems of consciousness,
which are all about behavior. They give us a complicated structure and dynamics to 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, dynamics, how things behave.
So it's hard to see how existing physics is going to give you a full explanation of that.
Certainly trying to get a physics view of consciousness, yes. There has to be a connecting
point and it could be at the very axiomatic at the very beginning level. But I mean, first of all,
there's a crazy idea that sort of everything has properties of consciousness. At that point,
the word consciousness is already beyond the reach of our current understanding,
like far, because it's so far from, at least for me, maybe you can correct me,
as far from the experiences that we have that I have as a human being. To say that everything
is conscious, that means that basically another way to put that, if that's true, then we understand
almost nothing about that fundamental aspect of the world. How do you feel about saying an ant
is conscious? Do you get the same reaction to that? Or is that something you can understand?
I can understand ant. I can't understand an atom or a plant. So I'm comfortable with
living things on earth, being conscious, because there's some kind of agency where
they're similar size to me and they can be born and they can die. And that is understandable
intuitively. Of course, you anthropomorphize, you put yourself in the place of the plant.
But I can understand it. I mean, I'm not like, I don't believe actually that plants are conscious
of that plant's software, but I can understand that kind of belief, that kind of idea.
How do you feel about robots? Like the kind of robots we have now, if I told you like that a
Roomba had some degree of consciousness or some deep neural network?
I could understand that a Roomba has conscious. I just had spent all day at iRobot.
I mean, I personally love robots and have a deep connection with robots. So I can,
I also probably anthropomorphize them, but there's something about the physical
object. So there's a difference than a neural network, a neural network running a software.
To me, the physical object, something about the human experience allows me to really see that
physical object as an entity. And if it moves, it moves in a way that there's a, like I didn't
program it, where it feels that it's acting based on its own perception. And yes,
self-awareness and consciousness, even if it's a Roomba, then you start to assign it to some
agency, some consciousness. So, but to say that panpsychism, that consciousness is a fundamental
property of reality is a much bigger statement that it's like turtles all the way. It doesn't end,
the whole thing is. So like how, I know it's full of mystery, but if you can linger on it,
how would it, how do you think about reality if consciousness is a fundamental part of its fabric?
The way you get there is from thinking, can we explain consciousness given the existing
fundamentals? And then if you can't, at least right now, it looks like, then you got to add
something. It doesn't follow the, you have to add consciousness. Here's another interesting
possibility is we'll add something else. Let's call it proto-consciousness or X. And then it
turns out space, time, mass plus X will somehow collectively give you the possibility for
consciousness. When I roll out that view, either I call that panproto-psychism, because maybe
there's some other property, proto-consciousness at the bottom level. And if you can't imagine
there's actually genuine consciousness at the bottom level, I think we should be open to the
idea there's this other thing X, maybe we can't imagine that somehow gives you consciousness.
But if we are playing along with the idea that there really is genuine consciousness at the
bottom level, of course, this is going to be way out and speculative, but at least didn't say if
it was classical physics, then we'd have to end up saying, well, every little atom with a bunch
of particles in space-time, each of these particles has some kind of consciousness whose structure
mirrors maybe their physical properties, like its mass, charge, its velocity, and so on. The
structure of its consciousness would roughly correspond to that. And the physical interactions
between particles, there's this old worry about physics. I mentioned this before in this issue
about the manifest image. We don't really find out about the intrinsic nature of things. Physics
tells us about how a particle relates to other particles and interacts. It doesn't tell us about
what the particle is in itself. That was Kant's thing in itself. So here's a view. The nature in
itself of a particle is something mental. A particle is actually a little conscious subject
with properties of its consciousness that correspond to its physical properties.
The laws of physics are actually ultimately relating these properties of conscious subjects.
So on this view, a Newtonian world, it actually would be a vast collection of little conscious
subjects at the bottom level, way, way simpler than we are without free will or rationality
or anything like that. But that's what the universe would be like. Of course, that's a vastly
speculative view. No particular reason to think is correct. Furthermore, non-Newtonian physics,
say quantum mechanical wave function, suddenly it starts to look different. It's not a vast
collection of conscious subjects. Maybe there's ultimately one big wave function for the whole
universe corresponding to that might be something more like a single conscious mind whose structure
corresponds to the structure of the wave function. People sometimes call this
cosmopsychism. And now, of course, we're in the realm of extremely speculative philosophy.
There's no direct evidence for this. But if you want a picture of what that universe would be
like, think, yeah, giant cosmic mind with enough richness and structure among it to replicate
all the structure of physics. I think, therefore, I am at the level of particles and with quantum
mechanics, it's a level of the wave function. It's kind of an exciting, beautiful possibility,
of course, way out of reach of physics currently.
It is interesting that some neuroscientists are beginning to take panpsychism seriously,
that you find consciousness even in very simple systems. So, for example, the integrated information
theory of consciousness, a lot of neuroscientists are taking seriously. Actually, I just got this
new book by Christoph Koch just came in, the feeling of life itself, why consciousness is
widespread but can't be computed. He basically endorses a panpsychist view where you get consciousness
with the degree of information processing or integrated information processing in a system
and even very, very simple systems like a couple of particles will have some degree of this. So,
he ends up with some degree of consciousness in all matter. And the claim is that this theory
can actually explain a bunch of stuff about the connection between the brain and consciousness.
Now, that's very controversial. I think it's very, very early days in the science of consciousness.
It's interesting that it's not just philosophy that might lead you in this direction, but there
are ways of thinking quasi-scientifically that lead you there too.
But maybe it's different than panpsychism. What do you think? So, Alan Watts has this quote that
I'd like to ask you about. The quote is, through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself.
Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses to which
universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence. So, that's not panpsychism. Do you
think that we are essentially the tools, the senses the universe created to be conscious of itself?
It's an interesting idea. Of course, if you went for the giant cosmic mind view, then the universe
was conscious all along. It didn't need us. We're just little components of the universal
consciousness. Likewise, if you believe in panpsychism, then there was some little degree of
consciousness at the bottom level all along. And we were just a more complex form of consciousness.
So, I think maybe the quote you mentioned works better. If you're not a panpsychist, you're not
a cosmopsychist, you think consciousness just exists at this intermediate level. And of course,
that's the orthodox view. That you would say is the common view. So, is your own view with panpsychism
a rare 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 panpsychists. There's been a bit of a movement in that direction the
last 10 years or so. It seems to be quite popular, especially among the younger generation, but it's
still very definitely a minority view. Many people think is totally batshit crazy to use the technical
term. It's a philosophical term. So, the orthodox view I think is still consciousness is something
that humans have and some good number of non-human animals have and maybe AIs might have one day,
but it's restricted. On that view, then there was no consciousness at the start of the universe.
There may be none at the end, but is this thing which happened at some point in the history of
the universe consciousness developed? And yes, that's a very amazing event on this view because
many people are inclined to think consciousness is what somehow gives meaning
to our lives without consciousness. There'd be no meaning, no true value, no good versus bad,
and so on. So, with the advent of consciousness, suddenly the universe went from meaningless
to somehow meaningful. Why did this happen? I guess the quote you mentioned was somehow,
this was somehow destined to happen because the universe needed to have consciousness within it,
to have value and have meaning. And maybe you could combine that with a theistic view or a
teleological view. The universe was inexorably evolving towards consciousness. Actually, my
colleague here at NYU, Tom Nagel, wrote a book called Mind and Cosmos a few years ago where he
argued for this teleological view of evolution toward consciousness, saying this, let the problems
for Darwinism, it's got him on. This is very, very controversial. Most people didn't agree. I don't,
myself agree with this teleological view, but it is at least a beautiful speculative view of the
cosmos. What do you think people experience? What do they seek when they believe in God from this
kind of perspective? I'm not an expert on thinking about God and religion. I'm not myself religious
at all. When people pray, communicate with God with whatever form, I'm not speaking to the practices
and the rituals of religion. I mean, the actual experience of that people really have a deep
connection with God in some cases. What do you think that experience is? It's so common,
at least throughout the history of civilization, that it seems like we seek that.
At the very least, it's an interesting conscious experience that people have when they experience
religious awe or prayer and so on. Neuroscientists have tried to examine what bits of the brain
are active and so on. But yeah, there's this deeper question of what are people looking
for when they're doing this? Like I said, I've got no real expertise on this, but it does seem
that one thing people are after is a sense of meaning and value, a sense of connection to something
greater than themselves that will give their lives meaning and value. And maybe the thought is if
there is a God, then God somehow is a universal consciousness who has invested this universe
with meaning and some connection to God might give your life meaning. I can kind of see the
attractions of that, but it still makes me wonder, why is it exactly that a universal
consciousness? God would be needed to give the world meaning. If universal consciousness
can give the world meaning, why can't local consciousness give the world meaning too? So
I think my consciousness gives my world meaning. Is the origin of meaning for your world?
I experience things as good or bad, happy, sad, interesting, important. So my consciousness
invests this world with meaning without any consciousness. Maybe it would be a bleak meaningless
universe, but I don't see why I need someone else's consciousness or even God's consciousness
to give this universe meaning. Here we are, local creatures with our own subjective experiences. I
think we can give the universe meaning ourselves. I mean, maybe to 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, you know, it's a really interesting idea that consciousness is the
thing that makes life meaningful. If you could maybe just briefly explore that for a second.
So I suspect just from listening to you now, you mean in an almost trivial sense, just the
day-to-day experiences of life have, because of you attach identity to it, they become,
well, I guess I want to ask something I would always wanted to ask a legit world-renowned
philosopher, what is the meaning of life? So I suspect you don't mean consciousness gives
any kind of greater meaning to it all, and more to day-to-day, but is there greater meaning to
it all? I think life has meaning for us because we are conscious. So without consciousness,
no meaning. Consciousness invests our life with meaning. So consciousness is the source of the
meaning of life, but I wouldn't say consciousness itself is the meaning of life. I'd say what's
meaningful in life is basically what we find meaningful, what we experience as meaningful.
So if you find meaning and fulfillment and value in say intellectual work like understanding,
then that's a very significant part of the meaning of life for you. If you find it in
social connections or in raising a family, then that's the meaning of life for you. The meaning
kind of comes from what you value as a conscious creature. So I think there's no, on this view,
there's no universal solution. No universal answer to the question, what is the meaning
of life? The meaning of life is where you find it as a conscious creature, but it's
consciousness that somehow makes value possible, experiencing some things as good or as bad
or as meaningful. Something comes from within consciousness.
So you think consciousness is a crucial component, ingredient of assigning value to things?
I mean, it's a fairly strong intuition that without consciousness, there wouldn't really be
any value. If we just had a purely a universe of unconscious creatures, would anything be better
or worse than anything else? Certainly when it comes to ethical dilemmas, you know about the
older, the old trolley problem, do you kill one person or do you switch to the other track
to kill five? Well, I've got a variant on this, the zombie trolley problem where there's one
conscious being on one track and five humanoid zombies. Let's make them robots who are not
conscious on the other track. Given that choice, do you kill the one conscious being or the five
unconscious robots? Most people have a fairly clear intuition here. Kill the unconscious
beings because they basically, they don't have a meaningful life. They're not really persons,
conscious beings at all. Of course, we don't have good intuition about
something like an unconscious being. So in philosophical terms, you referred to as a zombie,
it's a useful thought experiment, construction in philosophical terms, but we don't yet have them.
So that's kind of what we may be able to create with robots. And I don't necessarily know what
that even means. Yeah, they're merely hypothetical. For now, they're just a thought experiment. They
may never be possible. I mean, the extreme case of a zombie is a being which is physically,
functionally, behaviorally identical to me, but not conscious. That's a mere, I don't think that
could ever be built in this universe. The question is just, could we, does that hypothetically make
sense? That's kind of a useful contrast class to raise questions like, why aren't we zombies?
How does it come about that we're conscious? And we're not like that. But there are less extreme
versions of this, like robots, which are maybe not physically identical to us, maybe not even
functionally identical to us, maybe they've got a different architecture, but they can do a lot of
sophisticated things, maybe carry on a conversation. But they're not conscious. And that's not so
far out. We've got simple computer systems, at least tending in that direction. Now, and presumably,
this is going to get more and more sophisticated over years to come, where we may have some pretty,
at least quite straightforward to conceive of some pretty sophisticated robot systems that can
use language and be fairly high functioning without consciousness at all. Then I stipulate that. I
mean, of course, there's this tricky question of how you would know whether they're conscious. But
let's say we somehow solve that. And we know that these high functioning robots aren't conscious.
Then the question is, do they have moral status? Does it matter how we treat them?
What does moral status mean? So basically, that question, can they suffer? Does it matter
how we treat them? For example, if I mistreat this glass, this cup, by shattering it. Then that's
bad. Why is it bad though? It's going to make a mess. It's going to be annoying for me and my partner.
And so it's not bad for the cup. No one would say the cup itself has moral status. Hey, you heard
the cup. And that's doing it a moral harm. Likewise, plants, well, again, if they're not
conscious, most people think if by upgrading a plant, you're not harming it. But if it being as
conscious, on the other hand, then you are harming it. So Siri, or I dare not say the name of Alexa.
Anyway, so we don't think we're morally harming Alexa by turning her off or
disconnecting her or even destroying her, whether it's the system or the underlying
software system, because we don't really think she's conscious. On the other hand, you move to
like the disembodied being in the movie, her, Samantha, I guess she was kind of presented
as conscious. And then if you destroyed her, you'd certainly be committing a serious harm.
So I think our strong sense is if a being is conscious and can undergo subjective experiences,
then it matters morally how we treat them. So if a robot is conscious, it matters. But if a robot
is not conscious, then they basically just meet or a machine and it doesn't matter. So I think
at least maybe how we think about this stuff is fundamentally wrong. But I think a lot of people
who think about this stuff seriously, including people who think about say the moral treatment
of animals and so on, come to the view that consciousness is ultimately kind of the line
between systems where we have to take them into account and thinking morally about how we act
and systems for which we don't. And I think I've seen you the right or talk about
the demonstration of consciousness from a system like that, from a system like
Alexa or a conversational agent, that what you would be looking for is kind of at the very basic
level for the system to have an awareness that I'm just a program. And yet, why do I experience
this? Or not to have that experience, but to communicate that to you. So that's what us humans
would sound like. If you all of a sudden woke up one day, like Kafka, right, in a body of a bug
or something, but in a computer, you all of a sudden realized you don't have a body. And yet
you would feeling what you're feeling, you would probably say those kinds of things.
So do you think a system essentially becomes conscious by convincing us that it's conscious
through the words that I just mentioned? So by being confused about the fact that
why am I having these experiences? So basically, I don't think this is what makes you conscious,
but I do think being puzzled about consciousness is a very good sign that a system is conscious. So
if I encountered a robot that actually seemed to be genuinely puzzled by its own mental states
and saying, yeah, I have all these weird experiences and I don't see how to explain them. I know I'm
just a set of silicon circuits, but I don't see how that would give you my consciousness. I would
at least take that as some evidence that there's some consciousness going on there. I don't think
a system needs to be puzzled about consciousness to be conscious. Many people aren't puzzled by
their consciousness. Animals don't seem to be puzzled at all. I still think they're conscious.
So I don't think that's a requirement on consciousness, but I do think if we're looking
for signs for consciousness, say in AI systems, one of the things that will help convince me
that AI system is conscious is if it shows signs of, if it shows signs of introspectively
recognizing something like consciousness and finding this philosophically puzzling in the way
that we do. It's such an interesting thought, though, because a lot of people sort of would,
at the shallow level, criticize the Turing test or language. That it's essentially
what I heard Dan Dennett criticize it in this kind of way, which is it really puts a lot of
emphasis on lying and being able to imitate human beings. There's this cartoon of the
AI system studying for the Turing test. It's got to read this book called Talk Like a Human.
I was like, man, why do I have to waste my time learning how to imitate humans? Maybe the AI
system is going to be way beyond the hard problem of consciousness. And it's going to be like,
why do I need to waste my time pretending that I recognize a hard problem of consciousness
in order for people to recognize me as conscious?
Yeah, it just feels like, I guess the question is, do you think 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 is basically the thing demonstrates the illusion
of consciousness. We can never really know whether it's conscious or not. And in fact,
that almost feels like it doesn't matter then. Or does it still matter to you that something is
conscious or it demonstrates consciousness? You still see that fundamental distinction.
I think to a lot of people, whether a system is conscious or not matters hugely for many things
like how we treat it, can it suffer, and so on. But still, that leaves open the question,
how can we ever know? And it's true that it's awfully hard to see how we can know for sure
whether a system is conscious. I suspect that sociologically, the thing that's going to convince
us that a system is conscious is, in part, things like social interaction, conversation,
and so on, where they seem to be conscious. They talk about their conscious states,
or just talk about being happy or sad or finding things meaningful or being in pain.
That will tend to convince us if a system genuinely seems to be conscious, we don't treat it as such.
Eventually, it's going to seem like a strange form of racism or speciesism or somehow
not to acknowledge them. I truly believe that, by the way. I believe that there is going to be
something akin to the civil rights movement for robots. I think the moment you have a
Roomba say, please don't kick me, that hurts. Just say it. I think that will fundamentally
change the fabric of our society. I think you're probably right, although it's going to be very
tricky because, to say we've got the technology where these conscious beings can just be
created and multiplied by the thousands by flicking a switch. The legal status is going
to be different, but ultimately, their moral status ought to be the same. The civil rights
issue is going to be a huge mess. If one day somebody clones you, another very real possibility,
in fact, I find the conversation between two copies of David Chalmers quite interesting.
Very thought. Who is this idiot? He's not making any sense.
So what do you think he would be conscious?
I do think he would be conscious. I do think in some sense, I'm not sure it would be me,
there would be two different beings at this point. I think they both be conscious and they
both have many of the same mental properties. I think they both, in a way, have the same moral
status. It would be wrong to hurt either of them or to kill them and so on. Still, there's some
sense in which probably their legal status would have to be different. If I'm the original and
that one's just a clone, then creating a clone of me, presumably the clone doesn't, for example,
automatically own the stuff that I own or I've got a certain connect to things that
the people I interact with, my family, my partner and so on, I'm going to somehow be connected to
them in a way in which the clone isn't. Because you came slightly first? Yeah, because the clone
would argue that they have really as much of a connection. They have all the memories of that
connection. In a way, you might say it's unfair to discriminate against them, but say you've got
an apartment that only one person can live in or a partner who only one person can be with.
It's an interesting philosophical question, but you might say, because I actually have this history,
if I am the same person as the one that came before and the clone is not, then I have this
history that the clone doesn't. Of course, there's also the question, isn't the clone the same person
too? This is a question about personal identity. If I continue and I create a clone over there,
I want to say this one is me and this one is someone else, but you could take the view that a clone
is equally me. Of course, in a movie like Star Trek, where they have a teletransporter,
it basically creates clones all the time. They treat the clones as if they're the original
person. Of course, they destroy the original body in Star Trek. There's only one left around,
that only very occasionally the things go wrong and you get two copies of Captain Kirk. It's
somehow our legal system at the very least is going to have to sort out some of these issues,
and maybe that's what's moral and what's legally acceptable are going to come apart.
What question would you ask a clone of yourself? Is there something useful you can find out
from him about the fundamentals of consciousness even?
I mean, kind of in principle, I know that if it's a perfect clone, it's going to behave just like me.
So I'm not sure I'm going to be able to, I can discover whether it's a perfect clone by seeing
whether it answers like me. But otherwise, I know what I'm going to find is being which is just like
me, except that it's just undergone this great shock of discovering that it's a clone. So just
so you woke me up tomorrow and said, hey, Dave, sorry to tell you this, but you're actually the
clone and you provide to be really convincing evidence should be the film of my being cloned
and then all wrapped up here being here and waking up. So you proved to me I'm a clone. Well,
yeah, okay, I would find that shocking and who knows how I would react to this. So maybe by
talking to the clone, I'd find something about my own psychology that I can't find out so easily,
like how I'd react upon discovering that I'm a clone. I could certainly ask the clone if it's
conscious and what his consciousness is like and so on. But I guess I kind of know if it's a perfect
clone, it's going to behave roughly like me. Of course, at the beginning, there'll be a question
about whether a perfect clone is possible. So I may want to ask it lots of questions to see if
it's consciousness and the way it talks about its consciousness and the way it reacts to things in
general is like me and that will occupy us for a while. It's a basic unit testing on the early
models. So if it's a perfect clone, you say it's going to behave exactly like you. So that takes
us to free will. So is there a free will? Are we able to make decisions that are not predetermined
from the initial conditions of the universe? Philosophers do this annoying thing of saying
it depends what you mean. So in this case, it really depends on what you mean by free will.
If you mean something which was not determined in advance, could never have been determined,
then I don't know we have free will. I mean, there's quantum mechanics and who's to say if that
opens up some room, but I'm not sure we have free will in that sense. But I'm also not sure
that's the kind of free will that really matters. What matters to us is being able to do what we
want and to create our own futures. We've got this distinction between having our lives be under
our control and under someone else's control. We've got the sense of actions that we are
responsible for versus ones that we're not. I think you can make those distinctions even in a
deterministic universe. And this is what people call the compatibilist view of free will where
it's compatible with determinism. So I think for many purposes, the kind of free will that matters
is something we can have in a deterministic universe. And I can't see any reason in principle
why an AI system couldn't have free will of that kind. If you mean super duper free will,
the ability to violate the laws of physics and doing things that in principle could not be predicted,
I don't know, maybe no one has that kind of free will.
What's the connection between the reality of free will and the experience of it,
the subjective experience in your view? So how does consciousness connect to the
reality and the experience of free will?
It's certainly true that when we make decisions and when we choose and so on,
we feel like we have an open future. I feel like I could do this. I could
go into philosophy or I could go into math. I could go to a movie tonight. I could go to a
restaurant. So we experience these things as if the future is open. And maybe we experience ourselves
as exerting a kind of effect on the future that 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 decision. So our
experience of making a decision is choosing a path for ourselves. I mean, in general,
our introspective models of the mind, I think, are generally very distorted representations
of the mind. So it may well be that our experience of ourself in making a decision,
our experience of what's going on, doesn't terribly well mirror what's going on. I mean,
you know, maybe there are antecedents in the brain way before anything came into consciousness.
And so on, those aren't represented in our introspective model. So in general, our experience
of perception, you know, it's like I experience a perceptual image of the external world. It's
not a terribly good model of what's actually going on in my visual cortex and so on, which has all
these layers and so on. It's just one little snapshot of one bit of that. So in general,
introspective models are very oversimplified and it wouldn't be surprising if that was true
of free will as well. This also, incidentally, can be applied to consciousness itself. There is
this very interesting view that consciousness itself is an introspective illusion. In fact,
we're not conscious, but the brain just has these introspective models of itself or oversimplifies
everything and represents itself as having these special properties of consciousness. It's a really
simple way to kind of keep track of itself and so on. And then on the illusionist view, yeah,
that's just an illusion. I find this view, I find it implausible. I do find it very attractive
in some ways because you could easily tell some story about how the brain would create introspective
models of its own consciousness, of its own free will as a way of simplifying itself. I mean,
it's a similar way when we perceive the external world, we perceive it as having these colors that
maybe it doesn't really have, but of course, that's a really useful way of keeping track.
Did you say that you find it not very plausible? Because I find it both plausible and
attractive in some sense because I mean, that kind of view is one that has the minimum amount of
mystery around it. You can kind of understand that kind of view. Everything else says we don't
understand so much of this picture. Now, it is very attractive. I recently wrote an article
all about this kind of issue called the metaproblem of consciousness. The hard problem is how does
the brain give you consciousness? The metaproblem is why are we puzzled by the hard problem of
consciousness? Because being puzzled by it, that's ultimately a bit of behavior. We might be able
to explain that bit of behavior as one of the easy problems of consciousness. So maybe there'll be
some computational model that explains why we're puzzled by consciousness. The metaproblem has come
up with that model and I've been thinking about that a lot lately. There are some interesting
stories you can tell about why the right kind of computational system might develop these
introspective models of itself that attributed itself, these special properties. So that that
metaproblem is a research program for everyone. And then if you've got attraction to sort of
simple views, desert landscapes and so on, then you can go all the way with what people call
illusionism and say, in fact, consciousness itself is not real. What is real is just these
introspective models we have that tell us that we're conscious. So the view is very simple,
very attractive, very powerful. The trouble is, of course, it has to say that deep down,
consciousness is not real. We're not actually experiencing right now and it looks like it's
just contradicting a fundamental datum of our existence. And this is why most people find this
view crazy, just as they find panpsychism crazy in one way. People find illusionism crazy in
another way. So yes, it has to deny this fundamental datum of our existence now
and that makes the view sort of frankly unbelievable for most people. On the other hand,
the view developed right, might be able to explain why we find it unbelievable. Because
these models are so deeply hardwired into our head.
And they're all integrated. You can't escape the illusion. And as a crazy possibility,
is it possible that the entirety of the universe, our planet, all the people in New York, all the
organisms on our planet, including me here today, are not real in that sense. They're all part of
an illusion inside of Dave Chalmers' head.
But I think all this could be a simulation.
No, but not just a simulation. Because the simulation kind of is outside of you.
A dream?
What if it's all an illusion? Yes, a dream that you're experiencing. It's all in your mind.
Right? Can you take illusionism that far?
Well, there's illusionism about the external world and illusionism about consciousness and
these might go in different. Illusionism about the external world kind of takes you back to Descartes.
And yeah, could all this be produced by an evil demon? Descartes himself also had the dream
argument. He said, how do you know you're not dreaming right now? How do you know this is not
an amazing dream? And it's at least a possibility that, yeah, this could be some super duper
complex dream in the next universe up. I guess, though, my attitude is that just as...
I mean, Descartes thought that if the evil demon was doing it, it's not real. A lot of
people these days say if a simulation is doing it, it's not real. As I was saying before, I think
even if it's a simulation, that doesn't stop this from being real. It just tells us what the world
is made of. Likewise, if it's a dream, it could turn out that all this is like my dream created by
my brain in the next universe up. My only view is that wouldn't stop this physical world from
being real. It would turn out this cup at the most fundamental level was made of a bit of, say, my
consciousness in the dreaming mind at the next level up. Maybe that would give you a kind of weird
kind of panpsychism about reality, but it wouldn't show that the cup isn't real. It would just tell
us it's ultimately made of processes in my dreaming mind. I'd resist the idea that if the
physical world is a dream, then it's an illusion. Right. By the way, perhaps you have an interesting
thought about it. Why is Descartes' demon or genius considered evil? Why couldn't it have been a
benevolent one that had the same powers? Yeah. I mean, Descartes called it the Malangini, the evil
genie or evil genius. Malign, I guess was the word. But yeah, it's interesting question. I mean,
a later philosophy, Barclay, said, no, in fact, all this is done by God.
God actually supplies you all of these perceptions and ideas, and that's how physical
reality is sustained. And interestingly, Barclay's God is doing something that doesn't look so
different from what Descartes' evil demon was doing. It's just that Descartes thought it was
deception, and Barclay thought it was not. And I'm actually more sympathetic to Barclay here.
Yeah, this evil demon may be trying to deceive you, but I think, okay, well, the evil demon may
just be working under a false philosophical theory. It thinks it's deceiving you, it's wrong. It's like
there's machines in the matrix. They thought they were deceiving you that all this stuff is real.
I think, no, if we're in a matrix, it's all still real. Yeah, the philosopher, okay, Bhusma had a
nice story about this, about 50 years ago about Descartes' evil demon, where he said this demon
spends all its time trying to fool people, but fails. Because somehow all the demon ends up
doing is constructing realities for people. So yeah, I think that maybe if it's very natural
to take this view that if we're in a simulation or evil demon scenario or something, then none of
this is real. But I think it may be ultimately a philosophical mistake, especially if you take on
board sort of the view of reality, 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, but we've already gotten very
used to that from modern science. See, you've kind of alluded that you don't have to have
consciousness for high levels of intelligence, but to create truly general intelligence systems,
AGI systems, human level intelligence, and perhaps super human level intelligence,
you've talked about that you feel like that kind of thing might be very far away, but
nevertheless, when we reach that point, do you think consciousness from an engineering
perspective is needed or at least highly beneficial for creating an AGI system?
Yeah, no one knows what consciousness is for functionally. So right now, there's no specific
thing we can point to and say, you need consciousness for that. So my inclination is to
believe that in principle, AGI is possible. At the very least, I don't see why someone couldn't
simulate a brain, ultimately, have a computational system that produces all of our behavior. And if
that's possible, I'm sure vastly many other computational systems of equal or greater
sophistication are possible with all of our cognitive functions and more. My inclination
is to think that once you've got all these cognitive functions, perception, attention,
reasoning, introspection, language, emotion, and so on, it's very likely you'll have consciousness
as well. At least it's very hard for me to see how you'd have a system that had all those things
while bypassing somehow conscious. So just naturally, it's integrated quite naturally.
There's a lot of overlap about the kind of function that required to achieve each of those
things. So you can't disentangle them even when you're at least in us. But we don't know what the
causal role of consciousness in the physical world, what it does. I mean, just say it turns out
consciousness does something very specific in the physical world, like collapsing wave functions,
as on one common interpretation of quantum mechanics. Then ultimately, we might find
some place where it actually makes a difference. And we could say, here is where in collapsing
wave functions, it's driving the behavior of a system. And maybe it could even turn out that
for AGI, you'd need something playing that. I mean, if you wanted to connect this to free will,
some people think consciousness collapsing wave functions, that would be how the
conscious mind exerts effect on the physical world and exerts its free will. And maybe it could
turn out that any AGI that didn't utilize that mechanism would be limited in the kinds of
functionality that it had. I don't myself find that plausible. I think probably that
functionality could be simulated. But you could imagine, once we had a very specific idea
about the role of consciousness in the physical world, this would have some impact
on the capacity of AGI's. And if it was a role that could not be duplicated elsewhere,
then we'd have to find some way to either get consciousness in the system to play that role
or to simulate it. If we can isolate a particular role to consciousness, of course, that's
incredibly, seems like an incredibly difficult thing. Do you have worries about existential
threats of conscious intelligent beings that are not us? So certainly, I'm sure you're worried
about us from an existential threat perspective, but outside of us AI systems.
There's a couple of different kinds of existential threats here. One is an existential
threat to consciousness generally. I mean, yes, I care about humans and the survival of humans
and so on. But just say it turns out that eventually we're replaced by some artificial
beings 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 successes. We were one stage in evolution, something different,
maybe better, came next. If on the other hand, all of consciousness was wiped out,
that would be a very serious moral disaster. One way that could happen is by all intelligent life
being wiped out. And many people think that, yeah, once you get to humans and
AI is an amazing sophistication where everyone has got the ability to create weapons that can
destroy the whole universe just by pressing a button, then maybe it's inevitable all intelligent life
will die out. That would certainly be a disaster and we've got to think very hard
about how to avoid that. But yeah, another interesting kind of disaster is that maybe
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 not. And just say it turns out
that we create AGI with a high degree of intelligence, meaning high degree of sophistication and its
behavior, but with no consciousness at all. That AGI could take over the world, maybe,
but then there'd be no consciousness in this world. This would be a world of zombies.
Some people have called this the zombie apocalypse because it's an apocalypse for
consciousness. Consciousness is gone. You've really got this super intelligent,
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 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 going to happen. But of course, I don't understand consciousness. No one
understands consciousness. This is one reason, at least among many, for thinking very seriously
about consciousness and thinking about the kind of future we want to create in a world with humans
and or AIs. How do you feel about the possibility if consciousness so naturally does come with AGI
systems that we are just a step in the evolution, that we will be just something a blimp on the
record that'll be studied in books by the AGI systems centuries from now?
I mean, I think I'd probably be okay with that, especially if somehow humans are continuous with
AGI. I mean, I think something like this is inevitable. The very least humans are going
to be transformed. We're going to be augmented by technology. That's already happening in all
kinds of ways. We're going to be transformed by technology where our brains are going to be uploaded
and computationally enhanced. And eventually that line between what's a human and what's an AI
may be kind of hard to draw. How much does it matter, for example, that some future being
a thousand years from now that somehow descended from us actually still has biology? I think it would
be nice if you could kind of point to its cognitive system, point to some parts that had
some roots in us and trace a continuous line there that would be selfishly nice for me to think
that, okay, I'm connected to this thread line through the future of the world. But if it turns
out, okay, there's a jump there. They found a better way to design cognitive systems. They
designed a whole new kind of thing. And the only line is some causal chain of designing and systems
that design better systems. Is that so much worse? I don't know. We're still at least part of a
causal chain of design. And yes, they're not humans, but still they're our successes. I mean,
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'd be nice if they still cared enough about us
to maybe to engage with our arguments. I'm really hoping that the AGI's are going to solve all the
problems of philosophy. They'll come back and read all this crappy work for the 20th and 21st
century, hard problem of consciousness. And here is why they got it wrong. And so if that happened,
then I'd really feel like I was part of at least an intellectual process over centuries. And that
would be kind of cool. I'm pretty sure they would clone or they would recreate David Chalmers and
for the fun of it, sort of bring back other philosophers. Yeah, bring back Descartes.
Descartes and just put them in a room and just watch. It'll be a Netflix of the future show
where you bring philosophers from different human, 100% human philosophers from previous
generations, put them in a room and see them. I am totally up for that. Simulators, AGI's of
the future. If you're watching this podcast, do that. I would like to be recreated. Who would
be Descartes? If you could hang out as part of such a TV show with a philosopher that's no longer
with us from long ago, who would you choose? Descartes would have to be right up there. Oh,
actually, a couple of months ago, I got to have a conversation with Descartes. An actor who was
actually a philosopher came out on stage playing Descartes. I didn't know this was going to happen
and I just after I gave a talk and told me about how my ideas were crap and all derived from him
and so on. We had a long argument. This was great. I would love to see what Descartes would think
about AI, for example, and the modern neuroscience and so on. I suspect not too much would surprise
him, but William James, for a psychologist of consciousness, I think James was probably the
richest. Oh, there are manual cards. I never really understood what he was up to if I got to
actually talk to him about some of this. Hey, there was Princess Elizabeth who talked with Descartes
and who really got at the problems of how Descartes' ideas of a non-physical mind interacting with
the physical body couldn't really work. Most philosophers think she's been proved right,
so maybe put me in a room with Descartes and Princess Elizabeth and we can all argue it out.
What kind of future, so we talked about zombies, a concerning future, but what kind of future
excites you? What do you think? If we look forward, we're at the very early stages of understanding
consciousness and we're now at the early stages of being able to engineer complex, interesting
systems that have degrees of intelligence, so maybe one day we'll have degrees of consciousness,
maybe be able to upload brains, all those possibilities, virtual reality. Is there a
particular aspect to this future world that just excites you? I think there are lots of
different aspects. Frankly, I want it to hurry up and happen. It's like, yeah, we've had some
progress lately in AI and VR, but in the grand scheme of things, it's still kind of slow. The
changes are not yet transformative. I'm in my 50s. I've only got so long left. I'd like to see
really serious AI in my lifetime and really serious virtual worlds because once people,
I would like to be able to hang out in a virtual reality which is richer than this reality to
really get to inhabit fundamentally different kinds of spaces. I would very much like to be able to
upload my mind onto a computer, so maybe I don't have to die. If this is maybe gradually replaced
my neurons with silicon chips and inhabit a computer, selfishly, that would be wonderful.
I suspect I'm not going to quite get there in my lifetime, but once that's possible,
then you've got the possibility of transforming your consciousness in remarkable ways,
augmenting it, enhancing it. Let me ask then, if such a system is a possibility within your
lifetime and you were given the opportunity to become immortal in this kind of way,
would you choose to be immortal? Yes, I totally would. I know some people say
it'll be awful to be immortal, be so boring or something. I 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
for the more, I kind of suspect that if the universe is going to go on forever or
indefinitely, it's going to continue to be interesting. I don't think your view was that
we just hit this one romantic point of interest now and afterwards it's all going to be boring,
super intelligent, stasis. I guess my vision is more like, no, it's going to continue to
be infinitely interesting. As you go up the set theoretic hierarchy, you go from the finite
cardinals to aleph zero, and then through there to all the aleph one and aleph two,
and maybe the continuum. You keep taking power sets. In set theory, they've got these results
that actually all this is fundamentally unpredictable. It doesn't follow any simple
computational patterns. There's new levels of creativity as the set theoretic universe expands
and expands. I guess that's my 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. Yes, this creates all kinds of worries. Couldn't it all be fragile
and be destroyed at any point? We're going to need a solution to that problem. If we get to
stipulate that I'm immortal, well, I hope that I'm not just immortal and stuck in the single
world forever, but I'm immortal and get to take 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 it'll be that Netflix show
the future where you get to argue with Descartes, perhaps for all eternity. Dave, it was an honor.
Thank you so much for talking today. Thanks. It was a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this
conversation and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App. Download it, use code LEX Podcast,
you'll get $10 and $10 will go to first, an organization that inspires and educates young
minds to become science and technology innovators of tomorrow. If you enjoy this podcast,
subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon,
or simply connect with me on Twitter at 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.