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Speaker 1: On the podcast, we love to ask deep questions and

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Speaker 1: then explore the edge of our knowledge. Today we're going

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Speaker 1: to go a little bit meta and try to understand

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Speaker 1: the workings of our own minds, the us that is

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Speaker 1: asking those questions and yearning to understand the universe, from

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Speaker 1: biology to physics, and yes, sometimes even a little bit

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Speaker 1: of chemistry. Science gives us this incredible tool to consistently

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Speaker 1: build knowledge about the universe, but it's not clear that

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Speaker 1: it can tell us about ourselves. That it can help

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Speaker 1: us understand why we have a first person subjective experience

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Speaker 1: in the first place, why we have an experience at all,

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Speaker 1: why chocolate has a taste and pain has a negative valance,

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Speaker 1: Why there's something it's like to be me. How's that

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Speaker 1: different from what it's like to be a bat? Is

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Speaker 1: it like anything to be a rock or a puddle

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Speaker 1: or a star? Science, like all you and endeavors, is

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Speaker 1: limited by the senses that we use to interact with

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Speaker 1: the universe. It can help us understand what we sense

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Speaker 1: and find patterns and build models, but it can't ever

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Speaker 1: really tell us about the hard reality of the physical

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Speaker 1: universe that exists out there beyond our minds and our senses,

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Speaker 1: and that same limitation might apply to the other end

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Speaker 1: of that sensory pipe. Can a scientist use science to

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Speaker 1: probe the nature of the mind while trapped inside their

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Speaker 1: own mind? That might just be the province of philosophy.

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Speaker 1: Today on the podcast, we're getting philosophical and asking what

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Speaker 1: we know and how we can know about how consciousness emerges.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinarily self Conscious Universe.

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Speaker 2: Hello, I'm Kelly Winnersmith. I study parasites and space, and

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Speaker 2: today I'm wondering if we live in a simulation.

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Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I don't

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Speaker 1: care if we live in a simulation. I want to

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Speaker 1: eat simulated dark chocolate.

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Speaker 2: So that's my question. Is it possible that we live

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Speaker 2: in a simulation? We're getting philosophical today, let's go all

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Speaker 2: the way.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, it's possible. But it also seems like a

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Speaker 1: modern reflection on recent concepts about how computers work. You know,

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Speaker 1: one hundred years ago, people thought the whole universe was

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Speaker 1: like pipes and cogs, and these days we think it's

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Speaker 1: all computers. So it's possible, but we also have zero

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Speaker 1: evidence that it's a simulation, and dark chocolate tastes really

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Speaker 1: really good anyway.

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Speaker 2: That's true, and so does pad see You. I'm hungry today.

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Speaker 1: This is why we shouldn't report the podcast just before lunch.

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Speaker 2: That's right. I'm so glad that I have simulated taste

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Speaker 2: buds and smell receptors so that I can enjoy all

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Speaker 2: of those things very much.

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Speaker 1: But it is fascinating to think about where your consciousness were,

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Speaker 1: where your experience comes from, why it is that you

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Speaker 1: even have one while you can like or hate pad

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Speaker 1: see You, whether or not that's something that comes from

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Speaker 1: the meat in your mind, or whether it's just the

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Speaker 1: information circling through those neurons which could be uploaded to

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Speaker 1: the cloud.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I think you'd have to be a

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Speaker 2: machine to not like TI food in general personally, but

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Speaker 2: I could be wrong. But I'm excited that so you

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Speaker 2: and I. We get a lot of emails from listeners.

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Speaker 2: You can send those emails to questions at Daniel and

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Speaker 2: Kelly dot org. And lately we've been getting a lot

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Speaker 2: of questions from folks who have been asking about consciousness.

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Speaker 2: I think we've been getting like one a week for

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Speaker 2: a while, and we decided it was time to jump

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Speaker 2: into the consciousness question, and you lucked out, and you

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Speaker 2: happen to know the perfect guest I do.

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Speaker 1: There's lots of really smart folks here at you See Irvine,

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Speaker 1: and I'm good at googling and finding them and persuading

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Speaker 1: them to come and talk to me on the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I have a lot of fun, and this is a

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Speaker 1: topic that's really close to my heart. I've been thinking

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Speaker 1: about it for a long time and also thinking about

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Speaker 1: whether it's something you really can ask scientifically. You know,

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Speaker 1: science is wonderful and powerful, and of course we are

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Speaker 1: advocates for science here on the podcast, But just because

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Speaker 1: it's a tool that does let us build knowledge about

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Speaker 1: the universe doesn't mean it's a tool that can answer

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Speaker 1: every question. Right. You can't answer the question like should

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Speaker 1: I get out of bed in the morning? Why do

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Speaker 1: people eat white chocolate? Anyway? Right, Not every question is scientific,

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Speaker 1: and so there are things about the universe that we

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Speaker 1: can probe with science, and there are limits to what

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Speaker 1: science can answer. And I've always wondered how much we

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Speaker 1: can understand about consciousness itself using science. So I was

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Speaker 1: really excited to talk to a cognitive scientist who thinks

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Speaker 1: about this all day in a very serious way.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited that consciousness is sort of at the

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Speaker 2: interface of science and philosophy, which makes it a really

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Speaker 2: fun topic to think about. And so I had a

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Speaker 2: lot of fun today with Megan Peter's chatting with her

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Speaker 2: about this.

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Speaker 1: Stopping before we dive into this wonderful conversation, we were

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Speaker 1: curious what folks out there thought about their own consciousness,

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Speaker 1: what ideas people have for why they even have an experience,

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Speaker 1: how these few pounds of goo in your brain somehow

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Speaker 1: generate all of this joy and frustration that we experience.

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Speaker 1: So I asked our cadre of volunteers to chime in

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Speaker 1: on the question how does consciousness emerge? If you'd like

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Speaker 1: to provide answers for a future episodes, please don't be

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Speaker 1: shy to right to questions at danieland Kelly dot org.

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Speaker 1: So think about it for a minute. How do you

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Speaker 1: think consciousness emerges? Here's what our listeners had to say.

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Speaker 3: I think we have to really think about what consciousness

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Speaker 3: might mean before we can figure out where it comes from.

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Speaker 3: But if I had to make a guess, I'd say

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Speaker 3: consciousness is just energy sliding into different forms as it

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Speaker 3: rolls along from our brain.

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Speaker 1: Jews exponential, exponential extension of the emergence of life. I

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Speaker 1: don't think anyone knows human consciousness is an intersection of

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Speaker 1: the more mechanistic functions of the human brain and the

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Speaker 1: created soul. I think consciousness needs you to have both

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Speaker 1: theory of mind and the complexity to apply it to yourself.

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Speaker 4: Very slowly on a Saturday morning after a night out

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Speaker 4: down the town with several coffees.

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Speaker 1: Consciousness is fundamental and that we are as humans somehow

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Speaker 1: tapped into it. Wow, consciousness, that's a bigie. Well, I

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Speaker 1: think it's magic.

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Speaker 3: As the parent of twins who think I'm pretty much useless,

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Speaker 3: I'll say it that somehow it involves interaction with others.

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Speaker 1: Consciousness emerges when the penguin models in. I've always leaned

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Speaker 1: towards the idea that consciousness is an illusion.

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Speaker 4: I believe consciousness emerges when the brain's elegical florid of

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Speaker 4: plasma interacts with the noise and dangers in the brain.

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Speaker 2: Thanks the brain itself is a sensory organ that can

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Speaker 2: sense its own processing.

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Speaker 3: A pint of strong fresh coffee is a necessary but

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Speaker 3: not sufficient condition.

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Speaker 1: It's a very complicated dance in the brain. It's a

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Speaker 1: very slow process. I think consciousness takes many, many forms,

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Speaker 1: things that the brain is doing, neural inspiring, reaching out

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Speaker 1: a critical consistency, and an introduction number.

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Speaker 3: I don't think we can know how consciousness emerges until

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Speaker 3: we know what consciousness is and if we have it all.

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Speaker 2: Right, We've got coffee, penguins, magic, all kinds of amazing

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Speaker 2: things in there, and a large diversity of answers.

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Speaker 1: Mmmmm, And there's a thread here. I've noticed a lot

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Speaker 1: of people suggesting that somehow it arises from the complexity

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Speaker 1: of the brain neurons, reaching a critical number or you know,

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Speaker 1: all these interactions. To me, that sort of frames the

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Speaker 1: question but doesn't really answer it, right, Like, why is

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Speaker 1: it the complex network of cells can have a consciousness

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Speaker 1: emerge regardless of the complexity, Right, It's not obvious to

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Speaker 1: me that complexity is enough. And that's really I think

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Speaker 1: the focus of the question for today's episode.

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Speaker 2: I would personally love to know the evolutionary reason why

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Speaker 2: we have consciousness, how does it benefit us? And would

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Speaker 2: we expect to see other animals to have it as well? Yeah,

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Speaker 2: and anyway, there were so many exciting things we talked

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Speaker 2: about with Megan today.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, there's lots of really fun questions there, like where

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Speaker 1: are there other species of humans which actually were more

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Speaker 1: intelligent but didn't survive because our ancestors were more warlike

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Speaker 1: or more cannibalistic? Right? Or if you ran the Earth

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Speaker 1: experiment a thousand times, how often would you even get

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Speaker 1: intelligence or more or less intelligence? All right? Is this

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Speaker 1: a fluke or is it a common outcome? Man? I'd

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Speaker 1: love to know the answer to those questions.

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Speaker 2: And you're also getting into some of the complexity there

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Speaker 2: because you were calling it intelligence and where does intelligence

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Speaker 2: end in consciousness begin? And what is the difference in

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Speaker 2: those things? And it gets complicated pretty fast.

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Speaker 1: It does. And fortunately we have an expert to help

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Speaker 1: us dig through this. So let's jump right into our

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Speaker 1: conversation with Professor Megan Peters from the Cognitive Science department

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Speaker 1: here at UC Irvine. All right, so it's my pleasure

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Speaker 1: to have on the podcast Professor Megan Peters. She's an

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Speaker 1: associate professor here at you see Irvine in the Department

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Speaker 1: of Cognitive Science. She's a PhD from UCLA in cognitive

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Speaker 1: science and her research aims to reveal how the brain

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Speaker 1: represents and uses uncertainty. She uses neuroimaging, computational modeling, machine learning,

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Speaker 1: and neural stimulation techniques to study all of this, and

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Speaker 1: most importantly, she agreed to come on the podcast and

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Speaker 1: talk to us about what is consciousness and answer all

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Speaker 1: of our questions and fend off Kelly's poop references.

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Speaker 4: Ah, good luck, Thank you both for having me. It's

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Speaker 4: really a pleasure to be here. As an aside, my

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Speaker 4: PhD is in psychology with a focus on cognitive and

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Speaker 4: computational neuroscience. If that matters, So you can cut this

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Speaker 4: part out if you want to redo that intro.

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Speaker 1: No, we'll find out if that matters, we'll see Yes,

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Speaker 1: absolutely great, So let's dig right in. I want to

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Speaker 1: know And this is maybe the hardest question we're going

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Speaker 1: to ask you all day. How do we define consciousness?

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Speaker 1: We're going to be talking about it, We're going to

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Speaker 1: be arguing about We're going to be saying do rocks habit?

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Speaker 1: Do dogs have it? But it's kind of slippery if

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Speaker 1: we don't even know what it is we're talking about.

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Speaker 1: So what is consciousness? How do we define this thing

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Speaker 1: that we all sort of know intuitively but have a

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Speaker 1: hard time describing.

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Speaker 4: Super important question and leads me into one of the

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Speaker 4: first kind of technical things that we'll talk about today,

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Speaker 4: which is the distinction between are the lights on? But

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Speaker 4: is anyone home? Essentially, So we talk in the fields

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Speaker 4: of psychology and in the philosophy of mind about the

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Speaker 4: distinction between what's called access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. So

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Speaker 4: these are terms that the philosopher and ned Block introduced

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Speaker 4: a while back, and the idea is that access consciousness

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Speaker 4: is about something like the global availability of information in

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Speaker 4: a complex system to allow that system to behave usefully

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Speaker 4: in its environment, to survive, to seek goals, to seek rewards,

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Speaker 4: to get food, to not be eaten by something. And

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Speaker 4: the distinction then is between you know, access consciousness, which

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Speaker 4: is information goes all over in the brain or in

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Speaker 4: the mind if there isn't a brain present. But the

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Speaker 4: difference then between that and phenomenal consciousness is that the

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Speaker 4: phenomenal consciousness has to do with the phenomenology of the

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Speaker 4: experience that the observer is having. So I'm going to

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Speaker 4: break that down that really just comes down to this

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Speaker 4: something that it is like to be you the qualitative

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Speaker 4: experiences that you have of the world. The fact that

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Speaker 4: pain hurts. It isn't just a signal like your tesla

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Speaker 4: would send to itself, like damage in my right front

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Speaker 4: tire or something like that. It's more like it has

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Speaker 4: qualitative character to it. There's something that it's like to

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Speaker 4: be in pain. If I whack you in the leg,

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Speaker 4: it's not just a signal that I've damaged the tissue

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Speaker 4: in your leg. There's more to it than that.

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Speaker 1: So are you saying that a tesla has access consciousness

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Speaker 1: because it notices damage in its tire, but it doesn't

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Speaker 1: feel pain, doesn't have anomenological consciousness, or if I miss.

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Speaker 4: Ansers, I wouldn't even go that far to say that

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Speaker 4: a tesla has any sort of access consciousness whatsoever. I

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Speaker 4: think that that's a higher bar there, But I think

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Speaker 4: that the distinction is important.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 4: We can imagine a system that has all of the

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Speaker 4: hallmarks of access consciousness, like a fancy future tesla. Okay,

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Speaker 4: you know that has all of this global availability of information.

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Speaker 4: It enables flexible adaptive behavior. It can change based on

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Speaker 4: its context. It's not just going according to its programming.

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Speaker 4: You know that kind of thing. And yet there's nothing

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Speaker 4: that it's like to be that fancy future tesla. It's

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Speaker 4: just a zombie. It's just engaging in behaviors that are

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Speaker 4: useful for that organism, but there's no one home. So

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Speaker 4: someone being home aspect is also really important because we

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Speaker 4: can imagine in like, you know, not a future robot scenario,

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Speaker 4: but just a medical situation where you've got a person

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Speaker 4: who's in a coma or they're in a persistent vegetative state,

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Speaker 4: and they might wake up seemingly and have of sleep

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Speaker 4: wake cycles and maybe respond to external stimuli. But the

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Speaker 4: critical factor in deciding whether you know someone's home whether

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Speaker 4: to keep them on life support is whether there's anything

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Speaker 4: is like to be them inside. And the flip side

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Speaker 4: is also really important in the context of medical science,

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Speaker 4: because even if they don't exhibit any of the outward

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Speaker 4: signs or symptoms of being conscious, of having access to

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Speaker 4: that available information, of being able to behave in their environments,

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Speaker 4: someone still might be in there. They might be locked in.

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Speaker 4: And so it's this presence of phenomenal experience of someone

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Speaker 4: being home, so to speak, that I think is the

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Speaker 4: important thing to remember when we're talking about consciousness in

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Speaker 4: the context of biological systems or artificial ones.

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Speaker 2: So I'm still trying to wrap my head around the

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Speaker 2: two different kinds of consciousness. Is there a kind of

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Speaker 2: organism or a situation a person can be in where

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Speaker 2: they would have one but not the other to help

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Speaker 2: me sort of differentiate.

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Speaker 4: Well, For humans, the idea is that, presuming that you

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Speaker 4: don't subscribe to, you know, philosophical zombiesm that like, you

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Speaker 4: have no idea that I'm conscious, right, I exhibit all

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Speaker 4: the hallmarks, but you have no idea. But presuming that

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Speaker 4: you don't want to go down that rabbit hole, I.

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Speaker 1: Do actually in a minute.

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Speaker 4: In humans, it seems like they go hand in hand, right,

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Speaker 4: that if you have access consciousness, you have phenomenal consciousness

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Speaker 4: in general as an awake, behaving organism. But there might

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Speaker 4: be cases in specific scientific experiments where you can reveal

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Speaker 4: symptoms or cases or evidence of access consciousness in the

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Speaker 4: absence of phenomenal consciousness. So there's some very specific psychological

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Speaker 4: experiments that suggests that these are separable entities. One classic

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Speaker 4: example is a task that was actually attributed to and

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Speaker 4: was developed by a cognitive scientist here in my department,

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Speaker 4: George Spurling. So this is the classic spurling task where

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Speaker 4: you show someone an array of letters. There's like five

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Speaker 4: letters in a row, and there's rows of letters, and

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Speaker 4: you flash it very fast, and you ask people to

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Speaker 4: kind of give their impression of the overall array, like

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Speaker 4: did you see it? Did you feel like you got

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Speaker 4: the whole thing? And people say, yeah, I feel like

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Speaker 4: I got the whole array. That's fine. But then when

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Speaker 4: you ask them to report the whole array they can't,

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Speaker 4: But when you ask them to report a specific row

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Speaker 4: they can't. It feels like there's a distinction then between

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Speaker 4: this feeling that you've got phenomenal experience of the whole array,

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Speaker 4: but your access might be limited, and so ned Block

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Speaker 4: has famously called this phenomenal consciousness overflowing access.

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Speaker 1: It seems to me sort of the crucial distinction, right,

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Speaker 1: because access consciousness is something we can understand sort of

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Speaker 1: on a fundamental level, Like we can trace signals into

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Speaker 1: your eye and watch those proteins fold and then up

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Speaker 1: the optic nerve and into your brain, but we can't

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Speaker 1: know whether anybody's there like experiencing, or what that experience

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Speaker 1: of seeing a red photon is, or whether my red

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Speaker 1: is the same as your red and all this sort

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Speaker 1: of dorm room philosophy kind of stuff, and so access

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Speaker 1: consciousness is sort of more accessible scientifically than phenomenological consciousness,

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Speaker 1: which is more philosophical. Is that fair?

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Speaker 4: I think that's a relatively fair characterization, and that there

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Speaker 4: are a lot of kind of current scientific theories of

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Speaker 4: consciousness that report to be a theory of consciousness, and

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Speaker 4: most of them, really, when it comes down to brass tacks,

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Speaker 4: end up being about access consciousness because the phenomenal part

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Speaker 4: is really hard to get at. As you said, I

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Speaker 4: think that there are some approaches that might be promising

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Speaker 4: in this vein. So you could look for neural correlates

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Speaker 4: or patterns of neural activity that are associated with reports

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Speaker 4: of phenomenal experience. So like I can create conditions where

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Speaker 4: I show you the same stimulus over and over and

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Speaker 4: over again, and so the early parts of your visual

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Speaker 4: brain are responding kind of similarly. I mean, there's noise,

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Speaker 4: and there's variability and so on, But if I flash

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Speaker 4: the same thing at you over and over and over again,

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Speaker 4: I'm going to get a consistent kind of pattern of

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Speaker 4: responding in the back of your head, which is the

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Speaker 4: early visual cortex. But you might have fluctuations in your

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Speaker 4: subjective experience of that stimulus. Sometimes you feel like you

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Speaker 4: see it, sometimes you feel like you can't. So to

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Speaker 4: the extent that I can hold most of the stuff

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Speaker 4: in the back of your head constant, and I can

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Speaker 4: measure that in relation to flashing something at you over

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Speaker 4: and over and over again. But then I look for

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Speaker 4: how your subjective experience fluctuates from one moment to the next.

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Speaker 4: I feel like I saw that strongly. I feel very

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Speaker 4: confident that I got that right. I feel like that

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Speaker 4: was nothing at all. I didn't really experience anything. Then

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Speaker 4: I can go look for neural correlates that are co

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Speaker 4: varying with the subjective experience that you're reporting to me.

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Speaker 4: There are a lot of problems with that too, that

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Speaker 4: maybe you don't have perfect access to your own subjective

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Speaker 4: experiences and your reports are spurious and blah blah blah.

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Speaker 4: But I think that there are ways that we can

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Speaker 4: go about trying to get at how the brain constructs

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Speaker 4: or supports or represents these subjective experiences that are different

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Speaker 4: from just how your brain processes information about the external environment.

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Speaker 1: Right, And I do want to get into those experiments.

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Speaker 1: But first I just want to make sure we're totally

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Speaker 1: clear on these definitions. And I think the example that

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Speaker 1: you were a little dismissive of a minute ago is

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Speaker 1: actually helpful, at least to me to clarify what we're

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Speaker 1: talking about. And that's the example of philosophical zombies. Right.

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Speaker 1: The idea here is, could you take Daniel and replace

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Speaker 1: him with some machine, biological or whatever that replicates all

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Speaker 1: of my actions? Seems the way I do to be conscious.

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Speaker 1: But there's nobody home, right, there's nobody experiencing the red

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Speaker 1: and eating the pizza and whatever. It's just, but it

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Speaker 1: seems like it reacts exactly the same way. So philosophical zombies,

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Speaker 1: as I understand them, and tell me if I'm wrong,

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Speaker 1: conjectures that it's possible to build something like this, which

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Speaker 1: means therefore that the phenomenological consciousness is totally unmeasurable. Right,

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Speaker 1: that there's no way for us to know we have,

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Speaker 1: As you said, we have to sort of trust your

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Speaker 1: first person reports about your subjective experience, which makes it

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Speaker 1: difficult to do any actual science. Right, is that a

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Speaker 1: fair characterization of philosophical zombies?

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Speaker 4: If I missed something, Oh, I have like five things

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Speaker 4: I want to say, let's make sure I get to

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Speaker 4: all of them. Okay, So first, the idea of philosophical

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Speaker 4: zombies has been hotly debated in the philosophical literature for

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Speaker 4: a very long time, and there are a number of

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Speaker 4: philosophers who say, yes, this is absolutely totally reasonable to

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Speaker 4: pause it, that this could happen, And then there are

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Speaker 4: other people who say, no, like, that's not really like

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Speaker 4: a reasonable assumption. So you know, go read Dan Dennitt

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Speaker 4: if you want to hear about all of this stuff.

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Speaker 4: But I think that you've touched upon another important point too,

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Speaker 4: which is this idea of testing for whether someone is

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Speaker 4: in there or not, and how we don't currently have

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Speaker 4: the capacity to do that even in other beings that

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Speaker 4: look and behave precisely exactly like you do, like me

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Speaker 4: or like.

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Speaker 1: Kelly, or chemists are like, are they really in there?

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Speaker 1: Do they actually like chemistry? Is that possible?

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Speaker 2: They have to be a machine?

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Speaker 4: Right, are they just lying?

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Speaker 1: Yeah?

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Speaker 4: We don't have a way of testing it. We don't

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Speaker 4: have like a consciousness ometer. I can't pull out my

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Speaker 4: hair dryer looking consciousness ometer and pointed at you and

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Speaker 4: be like are you conscious? Like we don't have that.

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Speaker 1: How do you know what it would look like? We

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Speaker 1: don't even have the device. Why does it look like

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Speaker 1: a hair dryer?

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Speaker 4: At some point actual clearman is positive that it was

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Speaker 4: going to look like a hair dryer, and it is

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Speaker 4: kind of propagated throughout by thinking since then. But that

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Speaker 4: seems about right right, Like it's kind of like a spidometer,

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Speaker 4: like they, you know, cop pulls up that on the

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Speaker 4: side of the road.

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Speaker 2: Too much consciousness, here's your ticket.

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Speaker 4: Something like that. But we don't have those and in fact,

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Speaker 4: like we wouldn't even know how to build one, right,

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Speaker 4: We don't even know what the relevant metrics are. Do

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Speaker 4: we care about measuring brain stuff? Or is that kind

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Speaker 4: of spurious? But one of the arguments kind of against

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Speaker 4: philosophical zombism is the supposition that consciousness is not just

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Speaker 4: this epi phenomenon, That it's not just this thing that

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Speaker 4: kind of comes along for the ride over and above

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Speaker 4: an organism behaving usefully in its environment and flexibly adapting

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Speaker 4: to different conditions and being intelligent and seeking goals and

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Speaker 4: not getting eaten by predators. That consciousness itself serves a

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Speaker 4: function that you cannot have all of that stuff, all

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Speaker 4: of that useful stuff for staying alive without consciousness. And

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Speaker 4: this is an arguable position. It's not a fact. But

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Speaker 4: the folks who are going to argue that consciousness serves

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Speaker 4: a function, there is a function of consciousness. It's not

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Speaker 4: just that there are functions for creating consciousness somewhere in

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Speaker 4: your head, but that consciousness itself is useful, that it

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Speaker 4: allows some evolutionary adaptive advantage. That is certainly a defensible position.

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Speaker 4: And from that context you actually couldn't have philosophical zombies

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Speaker 4: at all, because it is actually impossible to get all

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Speaker 4: of those other behaviors and cognitive processes and all of

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Speaker 4: that stuff without the consciousness bit.

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Speaker 1: I see. If that's true, then the interaction with people

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Speaker 1: who appear to be conscious is evidence that they are

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Speaker 1: actually conscious.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, but these are all like arguments that we can have, right.

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Speaker 4: There's no way of saying I'm right and you're wrong,

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Speaker 4: depending on which position you're holding.

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Speaker 1: I think about this when I interact with my dog,

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Speaker 1: you know, because I feel like my dog is in

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Speaker 1: there right, Like my dog knows me, my dog loves me.

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Speaker 1: I love my dog. My dog understands that I love him,

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Speaker 1: that I'm nice to him. It's hard to imagine that

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Speaker 1: there's nobody at home in my dog. But you know,

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Speaker 1: this whole concept suggests that it's possible for there to

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Speaker 1: be a machine effectively, and I say a machine just

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Speaker 1: to indicate like that there's nobody home, though I don't

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Speaker 1: actually know if AI could have phenomenological consciousness, But it's

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Speaker 1: hard to imagine that you're not actually in there, Kelly's

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Speaker 1: not actually in there. I'm the only one in the

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Speaker 1: universe who's experiencing this, but I can't actually prove it, right,

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Speaker 1: So it really isn't fundamentally important point, even though it

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Speaker 1: sounds absurd on the face of it, right that we

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Speaker 1: could be the only one aware that we can't actually

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Speaker 1: know if anybody else is in there. We feel people

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Speaker 1: loving us, you know, and their experience and their pain

438
00:23:19,040 --> 00:23:21,840
Speaker 1: reflects ours, but we can't actually know, And I think

439
00:23:21,840 --> 00:23:24,400
Speaker 1: that's a fundamentally important point to hold on to, even

440
00:23:24,440 --> 00:23:25,719
Speaker 1: though it feels ridiculous.

441
00:23:26,000 --> 00:23:29,679
Speaker 4: It is, I mean, the easiest solution here is that

442
00:23:29,720 --> 00:23:31,639
Speaker 4: we all have consciousness, right Like that would be the

443
00:23:31,640 --> 00:23:35,320
Speaker 4: most parsimonious explanation, and it's easy to make that leap

444
00:23:35,440 --> 00:23:41,679
Speaker 4: because there's so many physical information processing similarities between you

445
00:23:41,760 --> 00:23:44,600
Speaker 4: and me. Right, our brains are not exactly the same,

446
00:23:44,640 --> 00:23:47,200
Speaker 4: but they're pretty darn close, and so we can make

447
00:23:47,200 --> 00:23:51,040
Speaker 4: the leap maybe to talking about great apes or monkeys

448
00:23:51,160 --> 00:23:53,960
Speaker 4: or dogs or other vertebrates, other mammals, that kind of thing.

449
00:23:54,440 --> 00:23:56,919
Speaker 4: I have a harder time when we get down into

450
00:23:57,200 --> 00:23:59,639
Speaker 4: you know, insects, like I don't know that it be

451
00:24:00,240 --> 00:24:01,160
Speaker 4: a really.

452
00:24:01,359 --> 00:24:03,480
Speaker 1: But I don't know, like what are people who like

453
00:24:03,520 --> 00:24:05,400
Speaker 1: live in Virginia, for example. That's just like.

454
00:24:07,119 --> 00:24:12,320
Speaker 4: I'm not going there. But the presence of like the

455
00:24:12,359 --> 00:24:16,480
Speaker 4: idea of a philosophical zombie, it becomes maybe a more

456
00:24:16,880 --> 00:24:20,440
Speaker 4: useful exercise from like an empirical science standpoint, or from

457
00:24:20,520 --> 00:24:23,680
Speaker 4: even a philosophy standpoint when we start talking about entities

458
00:24:23,720 --> 00:24:27,200
Speaker 4: that are so fundamentally different from us, so not just

459
00:24:27,359 --> 00:24:30,560
Speaker 4: you versus me, or us versus your dog or my cat,

460
00:24:30,600 --> 00:24:32,399
Speaker 4: who you know is probably right on the bord of it,

461
00:24:33,760 --> 00:24:36,840
Speaker 4: but no, I think he's conscious. I think there's something

462
00:24:36,880 --> 00:24:39,200
Speaker 4: that it's like to be him. But when we talk

463
00:24:39,240 --> 00:24:43,760
Speaker 4: about octopuses like those are really weirdly different creatures that

464
00:24:43,800 --> 00:24:46,960
Speaker 4: are basically aliens, or when we talk about you know,

465
00:24:47,080 --> 00:24:51,280
Speaker 4: the potential for silicon based systems in the future or

466
00:24:51,440 --> 00:24:53,879
Speaker 4: alien species or those kinds of things, things that are

467
00:24:53,920 --> 00:24:57,160
Speaker 4: so fundamentally different from us. Then it starts to be like, okay, well,

468
00:24:57,240 --> 00:24:58,960
Speaker 4: when we don't have the kind of one to one

469
00:24:59,000 --> 00:25:02,639
Speaker 4: mapping between the str ure of my biological robot that

470
00:25:02,680 --> 00:25:05,959
Speaker 4: I drive around and your biological robot that you drive around,

471
00:25:06,680 --> 00:25:08,520
Speaker 4: right when we don't have that very similar to it,

472
00:25:08,640 --> 00:25:10,800
Speaker 4: then it becomes maybe a little bit more useful to

473
00:25:10,840 --> 00:25:13,359
Speaker 4: talk about, like can you have all of these behaviors

474
00:25:13,720 --> 00:25:17,040
Speaker 4: and all of these cognitive capacities in the absence of

475
00:25:17,520 --> 00:25:20,080
Speaker 4: someone being home? And we don't know the answer, but

476
00:25:20,240 --> 00:25:22,680
Speaker 4: it at least gives us more than just kind of

477
00:25:22,720 --> 00:25:26,320
Speaker 4: a philosophical, as you said, dorm room argument. Feel like

478
00:25:26,440 --> 00:25:28,359
Speaker 4: I don't know that you're in there, But is that

479
00:25:28,440 --> 00:25:30,600
Speaker 4: a difference that makes a difference right now? Probably not?

480
00:25:30,920 --> 00:25:32,240
Speaker 2: All right, So we're going to take a break and

481
00:25:32,240 --> 00:25:34,400
Speaker 2: when we get back, we're going to dig into OCTOPI

482
00:25:34,520 --> 00:25:53,640
Speaker 2: a little bit more so for access consciousness. And you've

483
00:25:53,680 --> 00:25:56,560
Speaker 2: sort of hinted at this already. The definition included like

484
00:25:56,680 --> 00:26:00,920
Speaker 2: escaping predators having different motivations That to me does sound

485
00:26:00,960 --> 00:26:04,760
Speaker 2: like it encompasses at least all vertebrates. So is it

486
00:26:04,920 --> 00:26:07,320
Speaker 2: safe to say then that the consensus is that all

487
00:26:07,440 --> 00:26:10,359
Speaker 2: vertebrates at least have excess consciousness.

488
00:26:10,600 --> 00:26:13,240
Speaker 4: I don't want to speak for any big scientific community

489
00:26:13,240 --> 00:26:16,600
Speaker 4: on anybody's behalf, I would say that my personal sense

490
00:26:16,880 --> 00:26:19,080
Speaker 4: is that, yes, you're going to be hard pressed to

491
00:26:19,119 --> 00:26:23,080
Speaker 4: find people who would die on the hill of saying

492
00:26:23,160 --> 00:26:25,840
Speaker 4: that cats are not conscious. I think that would be

493
00:26:25,880 --> 00:26:26,560
Speaker 4: hard to find.

494
00:26:26,760 --> 00:26:30,159
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you mentioned that octopus they're smart, but their

495
00:26:30,160 --> 00:26:31,960
Speaker 2: brain is different than ours. Would you say that they

496
00:26:31,960 --> 00:26:35,680
Speaker 2: have phenomenological consciousness because it seems like someone's in there

497
00:26:35,720 --> 00:26:36,840
Speaker 2: when you interact with them.

498
00:26:37,040 --> 00:26:40,320
Speaker 4: I have no idea. I have no idea, but I

499
00:26:40,359 --> 00:26:42,880
Speaker 4: think that you know, saying that we have no idea

500
00:26:43,119 --> 00:26:46,520
Speaker 4: is reasonable. Yeah, under this situation that I don't think

501
00:26:46,560 --> 00:26:50,520
Speaker 4: that we have strong empirical evidence either way, because that

502
00:26:50,640 --> 00:26:53,960
Speaker 4: strong empirical evidence is predicated on this whole conversation that

503
00:26:54,000 --> 00:26:56,400
Speaker 4: we've just been having about what would that evidence even

504
00:26:56,440 --> 00:26:59,960
Speaker 4: look like? And how do you separate evidence for phenomenal

505
00:27:00,280 --> 00:27:04,280
Speaker 4: consciousness from evidence for not just access consciousness but just

506
00:27:04,440 --> 00:27:09,280
Speaker 4: pure intelligent behavior. Right, Never mind access consciousness and this

507
00:27:09,359 --> 00:27:14,640
Speaker 4: global availability of information thing. It's really just that octopuses

508
00:27:14,760 --> 00:27:20,560
Speaker 4: occupy are very intelligent. They're very intelligent. Clearly, they can

509
00:27:20,600 --> 00:27:23,000
Speaker 4: be even sneaky, you know, they get out of their

510
00:27:23,040 --> 00:27:25,120
Speaker 4: cage and they go open something and steal the food

511
00:27:25,160 --> 00:27:26,400
Speaker 4: and then they go home so that they don't get

512
00:27:26,400 --> 00:27:31,560
Speaker 4: in trouble. So they're clearly highly intelligent creatures. I think

513
00:27:31,680 --> 00:27:35,879
Speaker 4: that my margins of uncertainty, my cone of uncertainty, is

514
00:27:35,960 --> 00:27:38,680
Speaker 4: just so wide there that I have no idea.

515
00:27:38,760 --> 00:27:41,720
Speaker 2: So how do you study the difference between intelligence behaviors

516
00:27:41,760 --> 00:27:45,600
Speaker 2: and consciousness. We'll just stick with access consciousness in animals

517
00:27:45,640 --> 00:27:46,120
Speaker 2: in the lab.

518
00:27:46,520 --> 00:27:49,680
Speaker 4: Yeah, so in animals that's even harder too, because how

519
00:27:49,720 --> 00:27:53,120
Speaker 4: do you query the phenomenal experience of a rat? It's

520
00:27:53,200 --> 00:27:55,719
Speaker 4: kind of hard. In my line of work, we focus

521
00:27:55,760 --> 00:27:59,520
Speaker 4: on one particular kind of subjective experience, which is that

522
00:28:00,040 --> 00:28:05,360
Speaker 4: of metacognitive uncertainty. So one of the things that we

523
00:28:05,440 --> 00:28:07,960
Speaker 4: ask people to do like people now, but we can

524
00:28:08,040 --> 00:28:10,400
Speaker 4: do this potentially in rodents and monkeys as well, though

525
00:28:10,400 --> 00:28:12,160
Speaker 4: I don't have those folks in my lab. I only

526
00:28:12,200 --> 00:28:15,040
Speaker 4: have people. Will ask you to do some task, like

527
00:28:15,080 --> 00:28:16,960
Speaker 4: we're going to show you some stuff on a computer screen,

528
00:28:17,040 --> 00:28:18,920
Speaker 4: ask you to press buttons, tell us what you see,

529
00:28:19,200 --> 00:28:21,720
Speaker 4: and then we'll ask for a subjective report on top

530
00:28:21,800 --> 00:28:24,080
Speaker 4: of it, How sure are you that you got that right?

531
00:28:24,520 --> 00:28:28,240
Speaker 4: How confident do you feel in your assessments? How clearly

532
00:28:28,280 --> 00:28:32,119
Speaker 4: do you think you saw the thing? And some of

533
00:28:32,160 --> 00:28:34,720
Speaker 4: those questions we can design experiments to ask in the

534
00:28:34,760 --> 00:28:37,840
Speaker 4: animals too, and so those are kind of more about

535
00:28:37,840 --> 00:28:43,480
Speaker 4: the subjective experience, especially if we do manipulations to the

536
00:28:43,520 --> 00:28:48,880
Speaker 4: stimulu or task such that the animal's behavior is basically

537
00:28:48,920 --> 00:28:52,840
Speaker 4: exactly the same between one condition versus another condition, but

538
00:28:52,920 --> 00:28:57,160
Speaker 4: their subjective reports differ. So that tells us that we're

539
00:28:57,160 --> 00:28:58,880
Speaker 4: trying to get at something that has to do with

540
00:28:58,920 --> 00:29:04,320
Speaker 4: phenomenology or maybe something that's facilitated by global access of information,

541
00:29:05,040 --> 00:29:08,360
Speaker 4: rather than something that's just kind of the zombie part

542
00:29:08,480 --> 00:29:11,920
Speaker 4: of their brain, like you know, almost reflex like responding

543
00:29:11,920 --> 00:29:14,720
Speaker 4: to the stimuli out there in the world. But the

544
00:29:14,800 --> 00:29:20,160
Speaker 4: distinction between is that subjective report facilitated by globally available

545
00:29:20,200 --> 00:29:23,840
Speaker 4: access to information or are we actually tapping into phenomenology.

546
00:29:23,880 --> 00:29:26,920
Speaker 4: That's also kind of sticky when you get to talking

547
00:29:26,960 --> 00:29:29,640
Speaker 4: about rodents and that kind of thing, But that at

548
00:29:29,720 --> 00:29:33,680
Speaker 4: least allows us to say, never mind all of phenomenal

549
00:29:33,720 --> 00:29:36,720
Speaker 4: experience or subjective experience or consciousness. I'm going to focus

550
00:29:36,720 --> 00:29:40,520
Speaker 4: on thisbit, just this one thing that I can operationalize,

551
00:29:41,000 --> 00:29:43,160
Speaker 4: very classic for a psychologist, Right, I'm going to put

552
00:29:43,200 --> 00:29:44,840
Speaker 4: you in a room and ask you to look at

553
00:29:44,840 --> 00:29:47,200
Speaker 4: a computer screen and press one of two buttons for

554
00:29:47,240 --> 00:29:49,960
Speaker 4: an hour, and that's what you're going to do. But

555
00:29:50,080 --> 00:29:51,400
Speaker 4: that's how we try to get at this.

556
00:29:52,000 --> 00:29:55,040
Speaker 1: I think the example of an octopus really puts the

557
00:29:55,080 --> 00:29:58,240
Speaker 1: finger or the tentacle on the question of like what

558
00:29:58,320 --> 00:30:01,600
Speaker 1: it's like, which to me is the core of the question. Like,

559
00:30:02,040 --> 00:30:04,960
Speaker 1: you know, the mechanics of how information is accessed or

560
00:30:05,040 --> 00:30:08,440
Speaker 1: stored or whatever. That's fascinating and that's good science. But

561
00:30:08,520 --> 00:30:11,240
Speaker 1: to me, the real question, which I think is what

562
00:30:11,280 --> 00:30:14,400
Speaker 1: people call the hard problem, is how you get to

563
00:30:14,920 --> 00:30:18,760
Speaker 1: have an experience from something which is you know, just

564
00:30:18,880 --> 00:30:21,480
Speaker 1: made out of stuff. Like my desk doesn't have an experience,

565
00:30:21,760 --> 00:30:24,880
Speaker 1: My computer, I think, doesn't have an experience. Most of

566
00:30:24,920 --> 00:30:27,280
Speaker 1: the universe doesn't have an experience. But I have an experience,

567
00:30:27,280 --> 00:30:29,760
Speaker 1: and you have an experience, and probably, for example, an

568
00:30:29,760 --> 00:30:33,160
Speaker 1: octopus has a very different kind of experience. It's got

569
00:30:33,200 --> 00:30:36,360
Speaker 1: like eight little brains arguing about what each leg will do,

570
00:30:37,040 --> 00:30:39,280
Speaker 1: and you know, an alien out there with a different

571
00:30:39,400 --> 00:30:41,680
Speaker 1: kind of sense. You know, a tongue that can taste

572
00:30:41,760 --> 00:30:45,160
Speaker 1: quantum electrons or something might have a completely different kind

573
00:30:45,240 --> 00:30:49,280
Speaker 1: of experience. And to me, the hard question is, you know,

574
00:30:49,360 --> 00:30:53,080
Speaker 1: where does this come from, this phenomenological aspect. Is it

575
00:30:53,120 --> 00:30:56,760
Speaker 1: fundamental to matter? Is it somehow emergent in some way

576
00:30:56,760 --> 00:30:59,960
Speaker 1: we don't yet understand? How do you pose this question?

577
00:31:00,320 --> 00:31:02,320
Speaker 1: Is that the central question you think, and how do

578
00:31:02,360 --> 00:31:04,320
Speaker 1: you think it's best asked?

579
00:31:04,560 --> 00:31:07,440
Speaker 4: I think that's absolutely one of the central questions. Is

580
00:31:07,520 --> 00:31:09,320
Speaker 4: you know, how is it that the something that it's

581
00:31:09,440 --> 00:31:12,719
Speaker 4: like that the conscious experience arises from matter. That is,

582
00:31:12,760 --> 00:31:16,800
Speaker 4: as you said that Dave Chalmer's hard problem, which is,

583
00:31:16,960 --> 00:31:20,000
Speaker 4: you know, there seems to be this fundamental disconnect between

584
00:31:20,040 --> 00:31:23,920
Speaker 4: patterns of brain response and the subjective experience. It's a

585
00:31:24,000 --> 00:31:27,520
Speaker 4: very different natural kind. It's a very different kind of stuff, right,

586
00:31:27,600 --> 00:31:31,560
Speaker 4: The subjective experience stuff is unlike any other kind of

587
00:31:31,600 --> 00:31:32,720
Speaker 4: stuff in biology.

588
00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:33,960
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?

589
00:31:33,960 --> 00:31:37,320
Speaker 4: That's the hard problem. That's the idea is that it's

590
00:31:37,400 --> 00:31:42,760
Speaker 4: not clear how you would get something like subjective experience

591
00:31:42,840 --> 00:31:48,400
Speaker 4: whatever that is, out of the interactions between physical neurons.

592
00:31:49,160 --> 00:31:51,640
Speaker 4: The bridge, you know, might be something like Okay, Well,

593
00:31:51,680 --> 00:31:54,719
Speaker 4: one of the things that physical neurons do in talking

594
00:31:54,760 --> 00:31:58,080
Speaker 4: to each other is similar to how computers do this

595
00:31:58,240 --> 00:32:00,800
Speaker 4: is that they create information. So now we're kind of

596
00:32:00,800 --> 00:32:05,400
Speaker 4: moving from physical space into information space, but nevertheless we

597
00:32:05,440 --> 00:32:08,800
Speaker 4: don't know how to even get from information to subjective experience.

598
00:32:09,320 --> 00:32:12,040
Speaker 4: We can call them the same thing and say how

599
00:32:12,040 --> 00:32:14,240
Speaker 4: we're done, like moving on with our lives, but that

600
00:32:14,320 --> 00:32:17,080
Speaker 4: doesn't feel satisfying. And there are people who think that

601
00:32:17,120 --> 00:32:18,920
Speaker 4: the hard problem is not a problem at all, that

602
00:32:19,000 --> 00:32:22,280
Speaker 4: subjective experience might not even exist at all, or that

603
00:32:22,400 --> 00:32:27,120
Speaker 4: our belief that subjective experience exists is an illusion. So

604
00:32:27,200 --> 00:32:29,960
Speaker 4: there's like a whole this is really complicated, and we

605
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:32,240
Speaker 4: could talk for hours and hours about this.

606
00:32:32,360 --> 00:32:34,760
Speaker 1: Who's experiencing that illusion though? In that case?

607
00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:38,000
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, exactly. But if you want to read about,

608
00:32:38,040 --> 00:32:42,360
Speaker 4: you know, illusionism from a very deep and powerful perspective,

609
00:32:42,800 --> 00:32:44,840
Speaker 4: I'm going to mention him again, go read Dan Dennett.

610
00:32:44,880 --> 00:32:48,160
Speaker 4: He wrote very extensively on this topic. So the fundamental

611
00:32:48,200 --> 00:32:50,280
Speaker 4: question is, you know, how do we get something like

612
00:32:50,320 --> 00:32:54,840
Speaker 4: consciousness out of something like brains? And is the substrate

613
00:32:54,920 --> 00:32:59,400
Speaker 4: important for creating the subjective experience and the shape and

614
00:32:59,480 --> 00:33:03,680
Speaker 4: nature of that subjective experience, or is there kind of

615
00:33:04,000 --> 00:33:07,920
Speaker 4: one type of consciousness that all kinds of systems might create,

616
00:33:08,440 --> 00:33:12,200
Speaker 4: regardless of their physical substrate. And you might maybe think

617
00:33:12,280 --> 00:33:15,520
Speaker 4: that the latter statement seems a little strange, that, like,

618
00:33:15,560 --> 00:33:17,920
Speaker 4: how is it that an octopus could create a subjective

619
00:33:17,920 --> 00:33:21,040
Speaker 4: experience that's very similar to mine because our substrates are

620
00:33:21,080 --> 00:33:25,640
Speaker 4: so fundamentally different. But we do see evidence of convergent

621
00:33:25,720 --> 00:33:30,400
Speaker 4: function in evolution in terms of things like digestion, where like,

622
00:33:30,440 --> 00:33:33,200
Speaker 4: you've got lots of very different kinds of systems that

623
00:33:33,320 --> 00:33:37,200
Speaker 4: all accomplish the same computation or function of digesting stuff,

624
00:33:37,760 --> 00:33:40,680
Speaker 4: And so it is possible to think that different substrates

625
00:33:40,720 --> 00:33:44,000
Speaker 4: might accomplish the same kind of function in creating the

626
00:33:44,040 --> 00:33:45,640
Speaker 4: same kind of conscious experience.

627
00:33:46,080 --> 00:33:48,120
Speaker 1: Are you saying that the fact that like birds and

628
00:33:48,200 --> 00:33:51,640
Speaker 1: bats evolve flights separately, but fundamentally it's the same thing,

629
00:33:52,160 --> 00:33:56,000
Speaker 1: suggests that different kinds of wet matter could generate the

630
00:33:56,000 --> 00:33:57,520
Speaker 1: same kind of subjective experience.

631
00:33:57,840 --> 00:34:00,680
Speaker 4: It is possible. I don't know, if you think that

632
00:34:00,760 --> 00:34:04,720
Speaker 4: consciousness serves functions, that there might be one kind of

633
00:34:04,720 --> 00:34:07,880
Speaker 4: subjective experience that best serves that function. The only thing

634
00:34:07,880 --> 00:34:10,000
Speaker 4: I was going to say Beyond that, though, is that

635
00:34:10,080 --> 00:34:13,960
Speaker 4: I'm more sympathetic to the idea that there's probably different

636
00:34:14,040 --> 00:34:18,120
Speaker 4: kinds of subjective experience across different substrates. It feels like

637
00:34:18,920 --> 00:34:22,080
Speaker 4: the burden of proof on saying that all subjective experiences

638
00:34:22,120 --> 00:34:24,760
Speaker 4: are kind of the same across lots of different systems

639
00:34:24,800 --> 00:34:27,320
Speaker 4: would probably be on the people who are making that claim.

640
00:34:27,360 --> 00:34:29,600
Speaker 4: I think it's much easier to say the kind of

641
00:34:29,640 --> 00:34:32,880
Speaker 4: subjective experience you have depends on the substrate that's generating it.

642
00:34:33,040 --> 00:34:35,359
Speaker 1: How else to explain how some people actually eat white

643
00:34:35,400 --> 00:34:37,719
Speaker 1: chocolate and claim to enjoy it, right, I mean, it's

644
00:34:37,719 --> 00:34:39,040
Speaker 1: impossible to understand.

645
00:34:38,680 --> 00:34:39,759
Speaker 2: That bem maladaptive.

646
00:34:40,200 --> 00:34:41,879
Speaker 4: So hey, I like what chalk?

647
00:34:42,040 --> 00:34:45,840
Speaker 2: Oh oh, sorry, that's all right. I'm from Virginia. Daniel's

648
00:34:45,840 --> 00:34:47,680
Speaker 2: just going around insulting everybody today.

649
00:34:48,120 --> 00:34:48,440
Speaker 1: All right.

650
00:34:48,480 --> 00:34:50,600
Speaker 2: So we were talking to Joe Wolf the other day.

651
00:34:50,640 --> 00:34:53,719
Speaker 2: She's an evolutionary biologist who studies convergent evolution. I feel

652
00:34:53,719 --> 00:34:55,719
Speaker 2: like if she were here, she would be explaining to

653
00:34:55,800 --> 00:34:58,319
Speaker 2: us about how if you look at traits, like, you know,

654
00:34:58,320 --> 00:35:00,879
Speaker 2: the evolution of the crab body plan, you'd really love

655
00:35:00,920 --> 00:35:03,200
Speaker 2: to like have an evolutionary tree where you can count

656
00:35:03,239 --> 00:35:05,839
Speaker 2: how many times this thing popped up and how many

657
00:35:05,880 --> 00:35:10,000
Speaker 2: times it disappeared to try to understand like its adaptive value.

658
00:35:10,120 --> 00:35:12,960
Speaker 2: What kind of preconditions you need before this thing comes

659
00:35:13,040 --> 00:35:16,240
Speaker 2: into existence? Could we ever have that in the study

660
00:35:16,239 --> 00:35:18,440
Speaker 2: of consciousness or will we never be able to know?

661
00:35:18,680 --> 00:35:22,439
Speaker 2: Like does an octopus have access consciousness? Will we ever

662
00:35:22,440 --> 00:35:23,160
Speaker 2: be able to get there?

663
00:35:23,680 --> 00:35:27,040
Speaker 4: Great question? As of now, the path is very murky

664
00:35:27,120 --> 00:35:30,000
Speaker 4: to me because as we just talked about it before,

665
00:35:30,000 --> 00:35:32,480
Speaker 4: like you can't pull out your hair dryer consciousness ometer

666
00:35:32,560 --> 00:35:35,040
Speaker 4: and pointed at things. And the challenge is really because

667
00:35:35,080 --> 00:35:38,279
Speaker 4: the thing that we're studying is by definition unobservable by

668
00:35:38,320 --> 00:35:42,200
Speaker 4: anybody except for the observer who is experiencing the consciousness.

669
00:35:42,480 --> 00:35:44,880
Speaker 4: Like that is the definition of what we're talking about,

670
00:35:44,920 --> 00:35:48,000
Speaker 4: and so it's really very different from anything else that

671
00:35:48,040 --> 00:35:49,440
Speaker 4: we study in science.

672
00:35:49,640 --> 00:35:52,160
Speaker 1: And their second wrinkle there also not only is this

673
00:35:52,239 --> 00:35:55,360
Speaker 1: something which we can't observe or measure we have to

674
00:35:55,400 --> 00:35:58,960
Speaker 1: rely on somebody reporting it, but it's also filtered through

675
00:35:59,000 --> 00:36:02,920
Speaker 1: our own consciousnes right, like we sort of assume consciousness

676
00:36:02,920 --> 00:36:05,719
Speaker 1: when we do science. We're saying we have hypothesis, we

677
00:36:05,760 --> 00:36:09,000
Speaker 1: do experiments, so everything is filtered through sort of like

678
00:36:09,120 --> 00:36:12,600
Speaker 1: two consciousnesses when we're even like talking about this, and

679
00:36:12,680 --> 00:36:15,000
Speaker 1: maybe you're about to answer this question, but like, is

680
00:36:15,080 --> 00:36:18,200
Speaker 1: this something we can probe scientifically or is it limited

681
00:36:18,239 --> 00:36:22,120
Speaker 1: to philosophical discussions on the roof with banana peels?

682
00:36:22,280 --> 00:36:25,280
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, there were like five questions that, Okay,

683
00:36:25,600 --> 00:36:28,560
Speaker 4: so is this something that we can study scientifically? Yes,

684
00:36:28,640 --> 00:36:30,560
Speaker 4: I think so, But I think that we need to

685
00:36:30,760 --> 00:36:33,359
Speaker 4: have a lot of help from philosophers. So a lot

686
00:36:33,400 --> 00:36:34,880
Speaker 4: of the work that I do, and a lot of

687
00:36:34,880 --> 00:36:39,520
Speaker 4: my scientific friends are not actually scientific friends only they

688
00:36:39,560 --> 00:36:42,359
Speaker 4: are philosophers as well, And I think that there's a

689
00:36:42,400 --> 00:36:44,440
Speaker 4: lot of value that we get from that.

690
00:36:44,719 --> 00:36:47,640
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I didn't mean to suggest that philosophical exploration

691
00:36:47,880 --> 00:36:51,120
Speaker 1: is like not valuable. It's absolutely like, you know, the

692
00:36:51,239 --> 00:36:55,120
Speaker 1: wonderful cousin of scientific exploration, and fundamentally important. But it's

693
00:36:55,120 --> 00:36:57,560
Speaker 1: also different, right, It gives different kinds of answers.

694
00:36:57,920 --> 00:37:00,359
Speaker 4: Yeah, it does. But I think that we need to

695
00:37:00,400 --> 00:37:04,759
Speaker 4: be informed by our philosophical friends down the hall in

696
00:37:05,160 --> 00:37:08,720
Speaker 4: understanding whether the experiments that we're designing are really getting

697
00:37:08,719 --> 00:37:11,480
Speaker 4: at the target that we think we're interested in studying.

698
00:37:11,920 --> 00:37:13,759
Speaker 4: And so there's a lot of work out there that's

699
00:37:13,840 --> 00:37:17,080
Speaker 4: like Okay, I'm going to tell the difference between whether

700
00:37:17,120 --> 00:37:19,560
Speaker 4: you're likely to wake up from a coma or not.

701
00:37:20,440 --> 00:37:23,400
Speaker 4: And that's really relevant in the clinical setting and is

702
00:37:23,680 --> 00:37:27,080
Speaker 4: so powerful and important that we do that. It doesn't

703
00:37:27,120 --> 00:37:30,400
Speaker 4: necessarily tell us about the experience that the person is having.

704
00:37:30,480 --> 00:37:32,839
Speaker 4: It just tells us kind of binary whether it's there

705
00:37:32,960 --> 00:37:35,600
Speaker 4: or not. And we need that. We need to have

706
00:37:35,680 --> 00:37:39,040
Speaker 4: measures that will allow us to predict is someone in

707
00:37:39,080 --> 00:37:42,360
Speaker 4: there right now? Are they awake? Are they likely to

708
00:37:42,440 --> 00:37:45,320
Speaker 4: wake up? We need all that stuff, but that doesn't

709
00:37:45,360 --> 00:37:49,719
Speaker 4: really get at the fundamental question of this subjective experience bit.

710
00:37:50,400 --> 00:37:52,319
Speaker 4: And we also have a lot of studies out there

711
00:37:52,360 --> 00:37:59,400
Speaker 4: that purport maybe to do research on conscious access, but really,

712
00:37:59,800 --> 00:38:02,880
Speaker 4: if you changed the question, you might start to be

713
00:38:02,920 --> 00:38:05,200
Speaker 4: skeptical about whether they're targeting that. So I'll give you

714
00:38:05,280 --> 00:38:09,680
Speaker 4: an example, which is I, as a psychologist, I put

715
00:38:09,719 --> 00:38:11,680
Speaker 4: you in a room and I ask you to tell

716
00:38:11,680 --> 00:38:13,400
Speaker 4: me whether you saw something or not. And that's a

717
00:38:13,400 --> 00:38:16,319
Speaker 4: subjective answer, right like did you see it? Did you

718
00:38:16,400 --> 00:38:19,480
Speaker 4: not see it? Right? Like, I'm asking you are you

719
00:38:19,600 --> 00:38:22,960
Speaker 4: consciously aware of this stimulus? And then I could go

720
00:38:23,040 --> 00:38:27,000
Speaker 4: measure brain responses or whatever that go with cases when

721
00:38:27,040 --> 00:38:28,960
Speaker 4: you said you saw it versus when you said you

722
00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:30,839
Speaker 4: didn't see it. And I say, okay, now I find

723
00:38:30,880 --> 00:38:33,960
Speaker 4: like the neural correlates of consciousness. But now imagine that

724
00:38:34,040 --> 00:38:38,680
Speaker 4: I replace you as the human observer with a photodiode.

725
00:38:39,520 --> 00:38:42,040
Speaker 4: I could do exactly the same experiment and I would

726
00:38:42,080 --> 00:38:46,759
Speaker 4: never conclude that that photodiode has conscious experience. Probably, So

727
00:38:47,080 --> 00:38:49,839
Speaker 4: I think that there's like a lot of challenges that

728
00:38:50,040 --> 00:38:54,960
Speaker 4: the philosophical fields of philosophy, not only of philosophy of mine,

729
00:38:54,960 --> 00:38:57,759
Speaker 4: but philosophy of science. I think too, like really has

730
00:38:57,840 --> 00:39:01,120
Speaker 4: a lot to say about how we're designing experiments and

731
00:39:01,160 --> 00:39:04,640
Speaker 4: how we're interpreting their results. There was another question that

732
00:39:04,680 --> 00:39:06,759
Speaker 4: you asked earlier in that stream, but now I don't

733
00:39:06,800 --> 00:39:09,360
Speaker 4: remember what it was. Maybe it's about like, can we

734
00:39:09,400 --> 00:39:12,680
Speaker 4: ever develop a test for consciousness? So that's another thing

735
00:39:12,719 --> 00:39:14,879
Speaker 4: that we should talk about. So there's been some work

736
00:39:14,880 --> 00:39:18,440
Speaker 4: that I've contributed to recently where we're saying, well, we

737
00:39:18,480 --> 00:39:21,440
Speaker 4: don't have a consciousness ometer, and we wouldn't even know

738
00:39:21,480 --> 00:39:23,239
Speaker 4: how to go about building one. We don't even know

739
00:39:23,280 --> 00:39:26,440
Speaker 4: whether pointing it a behavior or brain or something entirely different,

740
00:39:26,520 --> 00:39:30,480
Speaker 4: Like I don't know, like aras some like crazy other thing.

741
00:39:30,520 --> 00:39:32,200
Speaker 4: We have no idea what to even point it at,

742
00:39:32,280 --> 00:39:35,080
Speaker 4: never mind how to build it. But one way that

743
00:39:35,120 --> 00:39:39,040
Speaker 4: we might make progress is to collect all of the

744
00:39:39,040 --> 00:39:42,760
Speaker 4: potential consciousness ometers that have been built over the years

745
00:39:43,120 --> 00:39:46,879
Speaker 4: in terms of behavioral signatures of awareness and humans and

746
00:39:47,120 --> 00:39:50,719
Speaker 4: neural response patterns and so on. Collects them all and

747
00:39:50,840 --> 00:39:55,880
Speaker 4: then make a decision about which ones are applicable. First,

748
00:39:55,960 --> 00:39:57,840
Speaker 4: how they all correlate with each other in terms of

749
00:39:57,880 --> 00:40:00,000
Speaker 4: predicting whether someone is in there and what they're experience,

750
00:40:00,960 --> 00:40:04,799
Speaker 4: and then whether they're applicable to a neighboring system. So

751
00:40:04,880 --> 00:40:07,560
Speaker 4: I'm not going to jump straight to octopuses or tesla's

752
00:40:07,680 --> 00:40:13,400
Speaker 4: or aliens, but i might jump to young children because

753
00:40:13,640 --> 00:40:17,160
Speaker 4: most of these studies and these metrics are developed on adults.

754
00:40:18,000 --> 00:40:20,359
Speaker 4: And so I'm going to say, okay, well, I'm going

755
00:40:20,360 --> 00:40:21,799
Speaker 4: to take all this stuff and then I'm going to

756
00:40:21,840 --> 00:40:23,960
Speaker 4: point it at young children, which I also presume are

757
00:40:24,000 --> 00:40:27,000
Speaker 4: probably in there. You know, when they stub their toe,

758
00:40:27,040 --> 00:40:30,120
Speaker 4: they cry like they indicate that they are experiencing pain.

759
00:40:30,800 --> 00:40:33,239
Speaker 4: And I'm going to see how much those metrics now

760
00:40:33,320 --> 00:40:38,120
Speaker 4: continue to correlate with each other and continue to make

761
00:40:38,280 --> 00:40:41,880
Speaker 4: useful predictions about whether that subject is aware of a

762
00:40:41,920 --> 00:40:45,279
Speaker 4: stimulus or not, or you know, wakefulness versus sleep, that

763
00:40:45,400 --> 00:40:47,640
Speaker 4: kind of thing. And then if that seems to be okay,

764
00:40:47,680 --> 00:40:49,160
Speaker 4: then I'm going to say, okay, now I'm going to

765
00:40:49,160 --> 00:40:51,600
Speaker 4: point them maybe at grade apes. Now I'm going to

766
00:40:51,600 --> 00:40:55,120
Speaker 4: point them, maybe at New World monkeys. Now I'm going

767
00:40:55,200 --> 00:40:56,520
Speaker 4: to point them. You know, so we can kind of

768
00:40:56,520 --> 00:41:01,000
Speaker 4: go down the evolutionary hierarchy, so to speak, and say, well,

769
00:41:01,400 --> 00:41:05,000
Speaker 4: the degree to which a particular candidate set of consciousness

770
00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:10,560
Speaker 4: ometers is applicable to a particular system is defined by

771
00:41:10,719 --> 00:41:13,600
Speaker 4: their similarity to us, and then we have to make

772
00:41:13,640 --> 00:41:16,920
Speaker 4: decisions about what metrics of similarity to use. But you

773
00:41:16,960 --> 00:41:19,480
Speaker 4: can see that, at least conceptually, from a high level,

774
00:41:19,600 --> 00:41:21,200
Speaker 4: this might be a path forward.

775
00:41:21,800 --> 00:41:24,280
Speaker 1: I have to admit I'm not convinced. Like it feels

776
00:41:24,280 --> 00:41:29,440
Speaker 1: to me like it's just making fuzzier what we're measuring

777
00:41:29,840 --> 00:41:33,279
Speaker 1: about what's going on mechanistically inside people's heads. But it

778
00:41:33,320 --> 00:41:36,840
Speaker 1: doesn't actually tell us anything about the first person experience,

779
00:41:36,880 --> 00:41:39,560
Speaker 1: which is almost because of the way we defined it,

780
00:41:39,640 --> 00:41:43,160
Speaker 1: infinitely inaccessible, right, Like there's no way for me to

781
00:41:43,200 --> 00:41:47,600
Speaker 1: share my experience with you other than and manipulating my

782
00:41:47,680 --> 00:41:50,840
Speaker 1: mouth or whatever and filtering it through your consciousness to

783
00:41:50,880 --> 00:41:53,960
Speaker 1: your first person experience. So it feels to me like

784
00:41:54,000 --> 00:41:57,480
Speaker 1: it's something that's completely inaccessible, and the only way forward,

785
00:41:57,800 --> 00:42:00,600
Speaker 1: I'm guessing is to like try to dig into this

786
00:42:00,680 --> 00:42:03,040
Speaker 1: emergent behavior and see if we can make a bridge

787
00:42:03,080 --> 00:42:08,040
Speaker 1: between the microscopic details that we do understand and somehow

788
00:42:08,280 --> 00:42:12,719
Speaker 1: come out mathematically with a realization of how this first

789
00:42:12,719 --> 00:42:15,840
Speaker 1: person experience has to emerge. I'm skeptical.

790
00:42:15,880 --> 00:42:17,880
Speaker 4: I guess well, I want to ask you about the

791
00:42:17,920 --> 00:42:20,680
Speaker 4: mathematical thing, because why is math the answer here?

792
00:42:20,840 --> 00:42:23,600
Speaker 1: Because I'm a physicist, because you're a physicist.

793
00:42:23,640 --> 00:42:27,120
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, sure, I knew the answer to that question

794
00:42:27,160 --> 00:42:30,000
Speaker 4: before I asked it. This isn't a zero some game.

795
00:42:30,040 --> 00:42:32,440
Speaker 4: We don't have to do one or the other. I

796
00:42:32,480 --> 00:42:34,719
Speaker 4: think that an analogy that a lot of folks in

797
00:42:34,760 --> 00:42:39,240
Speaker 4: consciousness science like to use is that of early investigations

798
00:42:39,239 --> 00:42:42,000
Speaker 4: into the nature of life and vitalism, and so this

799
00:42:42,120 --> 00:42:44,880
Speaker 4: idea that we had to discover this very specific, fancy

800
00:42:44,920 --> 00:42:47,719
Speaker 4: thing that was almost magical in nature, that was like

801
00:42:47,800 --> 00:42:49,760
Speaker 4: why is this alive? And why is this not alive?

802
00:42:49,800 --> 00:42:51,640
Speaker 4: And like let's maybe do some math or maybe like

803
00:42:51,680 --> 00:42:54,359
Speaker 4: do a bunch of empirical experiments to discover like the

804
00:42:54,400 --> 00:42:58,799
Speaker 4: life force or the vitalism, like the lifeness there. Then

805
00:42:58,920 --> 00:43:01,960
Speaker 4: over time we discover that it turns out that life

806
00:43:02,000 --> 00:43:03,919
Speaker 4: is just kind of a collection. It's like a bag

807
00:43:03,960 --> 00:43:06,359
Speaker 4: of tricks, right, and the boundaries are maybe a little

808
00:43:06,400 --> 00:43:08,920
Speaker 4: bit fuzzy, and like what are viruses? Are those alive?

809
00:43:08,960 --> 00:43:13,359
Speaker 4: I don't know. So maybe there's an analogy here, which

810
00:43:13,400 --> 00:43:15,960
Speaker 4: is that if we keep pushing on multiple angles, that

811
00:43:16,560 --> 00:43:21,239
Speaker 4: there might be a convergence of approaches and information and

812
00:43:21,239 --> 00:43:24,799
Speaker 4: evidence that will reveal that this hard problem is just

813
00:43:24,840 --> 00:43:27,360
Speaker 4: going to go away. We don't have to discover a

814
00:43:27,400 --> 00:43:32,200
Speaker 4: mathematical transformation or an emergent property or anything like that

815
00:43:32,200 --> 00:43:35,879
Speaker 4: that by better describing the system we will discover that

816
00:43:35,880 --> 00:43:39,960
Speaker 4: that problem completely dissolves. I don't know, but it's possible.

817
00:43:40,120 --> 00:43:43,279
Speaker 4: And we saw we have historical examples of cases where

818
00:43:43,280 --> 00:43:46,120
Speaker 4: something that seemed very mysterious and seemed like an emergent

819
00:43:46,160 --> 00:43:51,200
Speaker 4: property has now been transformed into a series of really

820
00:43:51,239 --> 00:43:56,640
Speaker 4: beautiful descriptions of how the system is working. And maybe

821
00:43:56,640 --> 00:43:58,160
Speaker 4: that will happen with consciousness too.

822
00:43:58,440 --> 00:44:01,560
Speaker 1: All right, well, my consciousness needs a break from all

823
00:44:01,600 --> 00:44:04,640
Speaker 1: these really heavy but amazing ideas. And when we get back,

824
00:44:04,800 --> 00:44:08,239
Speaker 1: I want to talk to Megan about some of the theories

825
00:44:08,200 --> 00:44:28,359
Speaker 1: people have to explain these deep mysteries. All right, we're

826
00:44:28,400 --> 00:44:31,200
Speaker 1: back and we're talking to the apparently conscious Megan Peters,

827
00:44:31,239 --> 00:44:33,920
Speaker 1: who tells us she is inside her body and driving

828
00:44:33,920 --> 00:44:36,480
Speaker 1: it like a meat machine, and she's an expert on

829
00:44:36,560 --> 00:44:39,080
Speaker 1: these questions of consciousness, so we should listen to her.

830
00:44:39,520 --> 00:44:41,560
Speaker 1: And we've been talking about this sort of hard question

831
00:44:41,719 --> 00:44:45,880
Speaker 1: of consciousness. How your first person experience is somehow generated

832
00:44:45,920 --> 00:44:48,880
Speaker 1: from the meat inside your head, or if you're an

833
00:44:48,920 --> 00:44:52,440
Speaker 1: AI and you're listening to this, the silicon inside your chips,

834
00:44:53,080 --> 00:44:55,680
Speaker 1: and you know, to me, this question of emergent behavior

835
00:44:55,719 --> 00:44:59,400
Speaker 1: is really important across science and especially in physics, you know,

836
00:44:59,440 --> 00:45:02,600
Speaker 1: where we see so many examples where we understand the

837
00:45:02,640 --> 00:45:05,200
Speaker 1: microscopic laws and then you zoom out and you need

838
00:45:05,239 --> 00:45:09,160
Speaker 1: different laws, you know, like we understand how particles work,

839
00:45:09,200 --> 00:45:11,000
Speaker 1: but then you zoom out and you need fluid mechanics,

840
00:45:11,040 --> 00:45:14,319
Speaker 1: and those laws are very different but still applicable. And

841
00:45:14,400 --> 00:45:16,520
Speaker 1: so it seems to me like there might be some

842
00:45:16,600 --> 00:45:19,400
Speaker 1: progress to be made if we can somehow tackle this

843
00:45:19,520 --> 00:45:22,359
Speaker 1: emergent question or think of it from this prism. But Megan,

844
00:45:22,440 --> 00:45:24,239
Speaker 1: tell us, what are people doing? What are the sort

845
00:45:24,280 --> 00:45:28,040
Speaker 1: of current leading theories of answers to the hard problem

846
00:45:28,080 --> 00:45:28,839
Speaker 1: of consciousness.

847
00:45:29,280 --> 00:45:33,080
Speaker 4: Great question. So, yeah, there's a number of theories that

848
00:45:33,200 --> 00:45:36,680
Speaker 4: kind of bridge between philosophy and neuroscience. So you know,

849
00:45:36,840 --> 00:45:39,640
Speaker 4: ultimately a lot of these theories are saying, the thing

850
00:45:39,680 --> 00:45:42,200
Speaker 4: that we know is conscious is us, and so we're

851
00:45:42,239 --> 00:45:45,240
Speaker 4: going to study consciousness in us because that makes sense.

852
00:45:45,400 --> 00:45:48,360
Speaker 4: And we can't go studying consciousness in rocks because we

853
00:45:48,400 --> 00:45:50,279
Speaker 4: don't know that they're conscious, and so that would kind

854
00:45:50,280 --> 00:45:53,719
Speaker 4: of be a circular argument. So these theories are kind

855
00:45:53,719 --> 00:45:58,799
Speaker 4: of bridging the gap between philosophy and neuroscience and psychology,

856
00:45:58,840 --> 00:46:01,400
Speaker 4: and they come in annumber of different flavors. And we

857
00:46:01,440 --> 00:46:05,360
Speaker 4: are touching upon also this difference between access consciousness and

858
00:46:05,400 --> 00:46:08,920
Speaker 4: phenomenal consciousness that we talked about before. But let's assume

859
00:46:08,920 --> 00:46:11,720
Speaker 4: that we can study consciousness scientifically. What do those theories

860
00:46:11,960 --> 00:46:16,960
Speaker 4: look like. So probably the most influential theory has been

861
00:46:17,040 --> 00:46:19,879
Speaker 4: the global workspace theory. So Bernie Bars and then stand

862
00:46:19,960 --> 00:46:23,919
Speaker 4: a Hand started this idea that consciousness is about the

863
00:46:23,960 --> 00:46:28,040
Speaker 4: global accessibility of information in kind of a centralized processing space.

864
00:46:28,080 --> 00:46:31,879
Speaker 4: So you have these different modules that either take in

865
00:46:31,880 --> 00:46:35,880
Speaker 4: information from the external world through your sensory organs, or

866
00:46:35,880 --> 00:46:40,000
Speaker 4: they have other functions like memory storage and recovery. They

867
00:46:40,040 --> 00:46:44,040
Speaker 4: have other functions like integration of different sensory systems information,

868
00:46:44,160 --> 00:46:48,240
Speaker 4: that kind of thing, executive function, decision making, sort.

869
00:46:48,120 --> 00:46:51,160
Speaker 1: Of mental analogies of organs, right the way you're like,

870
00:46:51,200 --> 00:46:53,400
Speaker 1: your liver has a function and your stomach as a function.

871
00:46:54,000 --> 00:46:57,960
Speaker 4: Yeah, to think about them as modules is typically how

872
00:46:57,960 --> 00:47:02,440
Speaker 4: they're described, you know, encapsulated modules. But then these modules

873
00:47:02,480 --> 00:47:06,600
Speaker 4: share information with a central global workspace where there's a

874
00:47:06,640 --> 00:47:12,239
Speaker 4: translation that happens between whatever representation is happening in that

875
00:47:12,400 --> 00:47:15,560
Speaker 4: module of the relevant information in that module, and then

876
00:47:15,600 --> 00:47:18,160
Speaker 4: it gets pushed into a global workspace. And if it

877
00:47:18,200 --> 00:47:20,799
Speaker 4: makes it into that global workspace, it's available to all

878
00:47:20,800 --> 00:47:23,600
Speaker 4: the other modules for processing, so it can influence the

879
00:47:23,640 --> 00:47:27,640
Speaker 4: processing in each of those other modules. And so the

880
00:47:27,719 --> 00:47:30,120
Speaker 4: idea is that this is kind of a computational level

881
00:47:30,200 --> 00:47:34,759
Speaker 4: theory where this global availability of information then facilitates goal

882
00:47:34,840 --> 00:47:38,480
Speaker 4: directed interaction with the environment. Run away from that thing,

883
00:47:38,600 --> 00:47:42,439
Speaker 4: don't get eaten, do eat that thing, et cetera. And

884
00:47:42,880 --> 00:47:46,439
Speaker 4: that we can also see hallmarks of this global broadcast

885
00:47:46,600 --> 00:47:51,040
Speaker 4: or global availability of information in the brain, where when

886
00:47:51,120 --> 00:47:55,720
Speaker 4: you have cases that someone becomes aware of something because

887
00:47:55,760 --> 00:47:58,520
Speaker 4: the signal is strong enough or so on, that you

888
00:47:58,600 --> 00:48:01,800
Speaker 4: actually see all of the information propagate throughout the brain.

889
00:48:02,040 --> 00:48:05,520
Speaker 4: You can see the information and say, a visual stream

890
00:48:05,680 --> 00:48:08,960
Speaker 4: of evidence not only land at the back of your head.

891
00:48:08,960 --> 00:48:10,719
Speaker 4: If you reach back and touch the back of your head,

892
00:48:10,760 --> 00:48:13,040
Speaker 4: you find that little bump that's about where your visual

893
00:48:13,040 --> 00:48:17,360
Speaker 4: cortex is. It's called the Indian So if you're not conscious,

894
00:48:17,400 --> 00:48:20,520
Speaker 4: the information stays back here in your visual cortex, and

895
00:48:20,600 --> 00:48:23,000
Speaker 4: if you are conscious of that information, you can actually

896
00:48:23,160 --> 00:48:29,080
Speaker 4: see with electrophysiology, with EEG, electrocapholography, with fMRI, you can

897
00:48:29,200 --> 00:48:34,600
Speaker 4: see that information travel forward and end up elsewhere. And

898
00:48:34,680 --> 00:48:39,000
Speaker 4: so this global availability of information, both from a neurophysiological

899
00:48:39,000 --> 00:48:42,960
Speaker 4: standpoint and from a computational standpoint, seems very useful for

900
00:48:43,040 --> 00:48:46,760
Speaker 4: an organism and seems very related to in us, whether

901
00:48:46,760 --> 00:48:48,400
Speaker 4: we're conscious of something or not.

902
00:48:48,840 --> 00:48:50,719
Speaker 1: And this seems like a helpful way to sort of

903
00:48:50,840 --> 00:48:54,759
Speaker 1: take apart what might be happening mechanistically inside the brain.

904
00:48:55,080 --> 00:48:57,040
Speaker 1: The way you might take a piece of code and

905
00:48:57,080 --> 00:48:58,800
Speaker 1: look at it and be like, oh, how they organizingk

906
00:48:58,840 --> 00:49:00,480
Speaker 1: oh is a database and the act with the hash

907
00:49:00,480 --> 00:49:03,600
Speaker 1: table whatever. Oh, this makes sense, but does it get

908
00:49:03,600 --> 00:49:07,640
Speaker 1: at the question of why is this thing experiencing itself?

909
00:49:08,000 --> 00:49:11,240
Speaker 4: Not necessarily? And that has been one of the criticisms

910
00:49:11,320 --> 00:49:14,640
Speaker 4: of global workspace theory or global neuronal workspace theory, which

911
00:49:14,680 --> 00:49:17,359
Speaker 4: is the neural version of it, which is that it's

912
00:49:17,440 --> 00:49:20,239
Speaker 4: kind of more about access consciousness or maybe even just

913
00:49:20,280 --> 00:49:23,400
Speaker 4: about global broadcast of information and not anything having to

914
00:49:23,440 --> 00:49:26,920
Speaker 4: do with the C word consciousness at all. And so

915
00:49:27,600 --> 00:49:30,279
Speaker 4: there have been other theories that kind of compete with

916
00:49:30,400 --> 00:49:32,560
Speaker 4: this one as well. So one of them is that

917
00:49:33,280 --> 00:49:36,360
Speaker 4: local recurrence, so like kind of local feedback within a

918
00:49:36,400 --> 00:49:40,200
Speaker 4: given module, specifically the visual cortex, that the strength of

919
00:49:40,280 --> 00:49:44,600
Speaker 4: that local feedback, that kind of recurrent processing looping, that

920
00:49:44,600 --> 00:49:47,880
Speaker 4: that is something that somehow gives rise to the experience

921
00:49:47,920 --> 00:49:50,680
Speaker 4: that we have of the world. And then there's another

922
00:49:50,719 --> 00:49:53,040
Speaker 4: group of theories that I happen to be partial to,

923
00:49:53,880 --> 00:49:56,880
Speaker 4: which is that there's an additional step that needs to

924
00:49:56,920 --> 00:50:01,680
Speaker 4: happen beyond broadcast into a global w or local recurrence

925
00:50:01,760 --> 00:50:05,279
Speaker 4: or anything else like that. And that additional step is

926
00:50:05,280 --> 00:50:08,799
Speaker 4: that you've got a second order or higher order mechanism

927
00:50:09,200 --> 00:50:11,480
Speaker 4: that's kind of self monitoring your own brain.

928
00:50:11,760 --> 00:50:15,040
Speaker 1: Why was higher order under scare quotes there for those

929
00:50:15,040 --> 00:50:15,560
Speaker 1: of you who.

930
00:50:15,520 --> 00:50:18,440
Speaker 4: Is listening, not scare quotes, but to indicate that this

931
00:50:18,560 --> 00:50:21,600
Speaker 4: is a specialized term, so that there are representations that

932
00:50:21,640 --> 00:50:24,160
Speaker 4: your brain builds about the world, and we would call

933
00:50:24,200 --> 00:50:27,640
Speaker 4: those first order, and then the representations that your brain

934
00:50:27,920 --> 00:50:31,759
Speaker 4: or your mind builds about itself or its own processing

935
00:50:31,880 --> 00:50:35,040
Speaker 4: would be higher order, second order, higher order. But the

936
00:50:35,160 --> 00:50:37,880
Speaker 4: idea here is that let's say that you have information

937
00:50:37,960 --> 00:50:41,640
Speaker 4: in these modules, it gets globally broadcast into a central workspace.

938
00:50:42,200 --> 00:50:44,960
Speaker 4: Your brain has to kind of make a determination of

939
00:50:45,800 --> 00:50:49,279
Speaker 4: is this information that's available in the global workspace, is

940
00:50:49,280 --> 00:50:52,640
Speaker 4: it reliable? Is it stable? Is it likely to represent

941
00:50:52,680 --> 00:50:54,759
Speaker 4: the true state of the environment. So this is where

942
00:50:54,760 --> 00:50:58,000
Speaker 4: you can see that I'm a metacognition researcher too. But

943
00:50:58,960 --> 00:51:01,880
Speaker 4: it turns out that higher order theories like this that

944
00:51:01,960 --> 00:51:06,279
Speaker 4: are about re representation of information that's available in some

945
00:51:06,440 --> 00:51:09,640
Speaker 4: workspace or some first order state, they actually came from

946
00:51:09,640 --> 00:51:14,840
Speaker 4: philosophy originally. They didn't come from the metacognition in literature. Originally,

947
00:51:14,880 --> 00:51:18,600
Speaker 4: So a philosopher named David Rosenthal and another one named

948
00:51:18,680 --> 00:51:21,200
Speaker 4: Richard Brown. They're both in New York. These are the

949
00:51:21,239 --> 00:51:25,080
Speaker 4: folks who kind of pushed forward this idea of higher

950
00:51:25,200 --> 00:51:31,040
Speaker 4: order representations being related to conscious experience, such that you

951
00:51:31,120 --> 00:51:36,920
Speaker 4: are conscious of something when you have a representation that

952
00:51:37,239 --> 00:51:40,720
Speaker 4: you are currently representing that thing. I'll say it again. Yeah,

953
00:51:40,880 --> 00:51:46,200
Speaker 4: So if I have a representation that consists of I

954
00:51:46,280 --> 00:51:50,759
Speaker 4: am currently in a state that is representing apple, then

955
00:51:50,800 --> 00:51:53,680
Speaker 4: I am conscious of the apple. It's not enough to

956
00:51:53,880 --> 00:51:56,680
Speaker 4: just have a representation of apple. I need to also

957
00:51:56,800 --> 00:52:01,319
Speaker 4: have on top of that state in my head that is,

958
00:52:01,719 --> 00:52:03,880
Speaker 4: I am currently representing apple.

959
00:52:04,320 --> 00:52:07,680
Speaker 1: But wouldn't the philosophical zombie also have that state inside

960
00:52:07,680 --> 00:52:10,560
Speaker 1: their cognition somewhere. How do we know that that actually

961
00:52:10,600 --> 00:52:12,240
Speaker 1: generates the first person experience?

962
00:52:12,320 --> 00:52:12,640
Speaker 4: We don't.

963
00:52:12,680 --> 00:52:14,239
Speaker 1: I want to be hard skeptic on this.

964
00:52:14,440 --> 00:52:17,320
Speaker 4: No, it can be hard skeptic. That's great. Even these

965
00:52:17,440 --> 00:52:20,680
Speaker 4: theories that say that you have a mechanism that says

966
00:52:20,760 --> 00:52:24,640
Speaker 4: I am currently representing this or that representation is good

967
00:52:24,719 --> 00:52:27,480
Speaker 4: and stable and likely to reflect the real world, they

968
00:52:27,560 --> 00:52:30,600
Speaker 4: don't answer the phenomenal consciousness question.

969
00:52:31,000 --> 00:52:35,560
Speaker 1: Right. I remember reading Dan Dennitz's really fun book Consciousness Explained,

970
00:52:36,040 --> 00:52:38,120
Speaker 1: and I'll admit that I was on a roof and

971
00:52:38,200 --> 00:52:41,239
Speaker 1: I was smoking banana peels at the time, but I

972
00:52:41,280 --> 00:52:43,560
Speaker 1: found it compelling in the sense that has sort of

973
00:52:43,640 --> 00:52:46,719
Speaker 1: changed the question right, sort of like his theory. Maybe

974
00:52:46,760 --> 00:52:49,120
Speaker 1: I'm sure you can describe it more accurately. You know,

975
00:52:49,160 --> 00:52:53,279
Speaker 1: his multiple drafts model sort of convinces you that your

976
00:52:53,520 --> 00:52:57,040
Speaker 1: account of your own consciousness might be wrong. You know

977
00:52:57,080 --> 00:52:59,920
Speaker 1: that there is no present moment. It's all just men

978
00:53:00,080 --> 00:53:03,120
Speaker 1: reas of the recent past that's later on constructed to

979
00:53:03,200 --> 00:53:06,560
Speaker 1: convince you that you were aware when you never really were.

980
00:53:07,200 --> 00:53:09,040
Speaker 1: And the something I like about that theory because even

981
00:53:09,080 --> 00:53:10,960
Speaker 1: though I don't believe it, it did make me think

982
00:53:11,000 --> 00:53:14,359
Speaker 1: differently about my own conscious experience. What do you think

983
00:53:14,360 --> 00:53:16,520
Speaker 1: of that theory? And are people still taking it seriously?

984
00:53:16,760 --> 00:53:19,080
Speaker 4: People are still taking it seriously. Yeah, And I think

985
00:53:19,160 --> 00:53:23,760
Speaker 4: that we don't have currently the empirical protocols or evidence

986
00:53:23,840 --> 00:53:26,279
Speaker 4: to say that that's wrong. And this is why I

987
00:53:26,360 --> 00:53:29,320
Speaker 4: want to continue to push for the close integration between

988
00:53:29,600 --> 00:53:32,719
Speaker 4: philosophy and neuroscience. This is another one where I'm going

989
00:53:32,760 --> 00:53:35,400
Speaker 4: to be agnostic. I don't like taking a stance on

990
00:53:35,440 --> 00:53:38,719
Speaker 4: all this because quite frankly, I think that anybody who

991
00:53:38,760 --> 00:53:42,279
Speaker 4: says that they have solved anything about consciousness is just

992
00:53:42,360 --> 00:53:44,960
Speaker 4: full of it, like, there's no way because we just

993
00:53:45,160 --> 00:53:47,680
Speaker 4: don't know. Right. We've got a lot of theories, and

994
00:53:47,719 --> 00:53:50,600
Speaker 4: we can build up empirical evidence and support of this

995
00:53:50,640 --> 00:53:53,319
Speaker 4: theory or that theory and this function of consciousness and

996
00:53:53,320 --> 00:53:55,880
Speaker 4: that kind of thing. But ultimately, if you say that

997
00:53:55,960 --> 00:53:59,520
Speaker 4: you've kind of created the solution, that your theory is

998
00:53:59,680 --> 00:54:01,960
Speaker 4: the write one, and you know that for a fact,

999
00:54:02,520 --> 00:54:06,200
Speaker 4: then sorry, Like, I don't know what banana peels you're on,

1000
00:54:06,440 --> 00:54:07,960
Speaker 4: but I don't think that's useful.

1001
00:54:08,160 --> 00:54:09,759
Speaker 1: Well, it was a bold title for a book, though,

1002
00:54:09,840 --> 00:54:10,800
Speaker 1: Consciousness Exploited.

1003
00:54:10,920 --> 00:54:13,760
Speaker 4: Yeah, Dan was a bold guy. Yeah.

1004
00:54:13,920 --> 00:54:15,319
Speaker 2: Yeah, So a lot of the theories that you were

1005
00:54:15,360 --> 00:54:17,600
Speaker 2: talking about a moment ago were using words that sort

1006
00:54:17,640 --> 00:54:21,080
Speaker 2: of remind me of computers and AI. How do we

1007
00:54:21,200 --> 00:54:23,680
Speaker 2: think about whether or not AI is conscious? Does it matter?

1008
00:54:23,760 --> 00:54:26,319
Speaker 2: Is that an interesting question? What do you think about that?

1009
00:54:26,640 --> 00:54:30,920
Speaker 4: Great question? And I think that until I don't know,

1010
00:54:31,480 --> 00:54:34,560
Speaker 4: ten fifteen years ago, this was a fun thought experiment

1011
00:54:34,640 --> 00:54:37,120
Speaker 4: in science fiction, And now I think it's not quite

1012
00:54:37,160 --> 00:54:40,839
Speaker 4: so much anymore, right because now we have machines that

1013
00:54:41,360 --> 00:54:45,560
Speaker 4: behaviorally really do pass the Turing test. Which I assume

1014
00:54:45,560 --> 00:54:47,880
Speaker 4: we're all quite familiar with, but just in case, the

1015
00:54:47,960 --> 00:54:50,480
Speaker 4: test is that the machine has to convince a human

1016
00:54:50,560 --> 00:54:53,720
Speaker 4: observer or a human player that it is a person.

1017
00:54:54,239 --> 00:54:57,839
Speaker 4: And we have machines that quite handily passed that under

1018
00:54:57,920 --> 00:55:01,919
Speaker 4: most scenarios or most get out your chat GPT app

1019
00:55:01,960 --> 00:55:04,319
Speaker 4: on your phone, and like it feels very convincing that

1020
00:55:04,320 --> 00:55:08,000
Speaker 4: there might be someone in there. Right, until maybe fifteen

1021
00:55:08,080 --> 00:55:10,680
Speaker 4: years ago, ten years ago, this was really science fiction,

1022
00:55:10,800 --> 00:55:14,160
Speaker 4: and now I think it's not anymore. And the questions

1023
00:55:14,719 --> 00:55:18,480
Speaker 4: not only bear on let's figure out the ontological truth

1024
00:55:18,520 --> 00:55:21,560
Speaker 4: of whether the AI is in fact conscious, but there

1025
00:55:21,640 --> 00:55:25,200
Speaker 4: is also really strong implications regardless of whether it's conscious

1026
00:55:25,280 --> 00:55:27,359
Speaker 4: or not, for what happens if we think it is,

1027
00:55:28,440 --> 00:55:31,240
Speaker 4: and what happens if it is but we think it's not. Right,

1028
00:55:31,320 --> 00:55:34,640
Speaker 4: So there's like strong moral and ethical considerations here. I'll

1029
00:55:34,760 --> 00:55:37,360
Speaker 4: kind of have two ways of answering this. One is

1030
00:55:37,400 --> 00:55:39,759
Speaker 4: from the perspective of current theories of how we think

1031
00:55:39,800 --> 00:55:44,600
Speaker 4: consciousness arises from a like functionalism perspective, which is that

1032
00:55:44,680 --> 00:55:48,440
Speaker 4: there is some brain or computational function that gives rise

1033
00:55:48,480 --> 00:55:51,600
Speaker 4: to consciousness in some capacity. A lot of the things

1034
00:55:51,600 --> 00:55:55,040
Speaker 4: that we're talking about you've rightly pointed out have direct

1035
00:55:55,080 --> 00:55:58,640
Speaker 4: analogies in computer processing. We can certainly build even a

1036
00:55:58,680 --> 00:56:02,680
Speaker 4: little simulation that monitor itself sure that says is this

1037
00:56:02,800 --> 00:56:07,279
Speaker 4: representation reliable or stable? I can build a set of

1038
00:56:07,280 --> 00:56:11,800
Speaker 4: computer modules that then send information into a global workspace.

1039
00:56:12,320 --> 00:56:12,600
Speaker 1: Sure.

1040
00:56:13,320 --> 00:56:16,040
Speaker 4: In fact, maybe your iPhone sort of does that already

1041
00:56:16,040 --> 00:56:18,400
Speaker 4: when you talk to Siri as the virtual assistant.

1042
00:56:18,480 --> 00:56:18,680
Speaker 1: Right.

1043
00:56:19,200 --> 00:56:24,080
Speaker 4: And recurrency in like local feedback or recurrent processing, that's

1044
00:56:24,120 --> 00:56:26,759
Speaker 4: absolutely recurrent. Neural networks are a thing. They've been a

1045
00:56:26,800 --> 00:56:30,640
Speaker 4: thing for a long time. So we have now all

1046
00:56:30,680 --> 00:56:34,319
Speaker 4: of these kind of hallmarks from these theories that we

1047
00:56:34,400 --> 00:56:36,880
Speaker 4: can use to build something that looks like a checklist.

1048
00:56:37,320 --> 00:56:40,080
Speaker 4: That's like, if you've got an artificial system that has

1049
00:56:40,160 --> 00:56:43,360
Speaker 4: all of these things, well, I'm going to not say

1050
00:56:43,440 --> 00:56:45,799
Speaker 4: then it's conscious, but I'm going to say it might

1051
00:56:45,960 --> 00:56:49,440
Speaker 4: raise our subjective degree of belief that it could potentially

1052
00:56:49,480 --> 00:56:50,520
Speaker 4: have consciousness.

1053
00:56:51,600 --> 00:56:53,279
Speaker 2: A lot of good qualifiers.

1054
00:56:52,760 --> 00:56:55,360
Speaker 4: There, Yeah, there are. Because we wrote this big paper

1055
00:56:55,719 --> 00:56:57,480
Speaker 4: me and a whole bunch of other people in twenty

1056
00:56:57,520 --> 00:57:00,200
Speaker 4: twenty three that's up on archive that's called consciousnes and

1057
00:57:00,280 --> 00:57:03,799
Speaker 4: Artificial Intelligence, and it goes through this checklist. It kind

1058
00:57:03,800 --> 00:57:07,480
Speaker 4: of develops the theoretical arguments for building this checklist, and

1059
00:57:07,520 --> 00:57:10,480
Speaker 4: then kind of ultimately says, look, we've got systems that

1060
00:57:10,520 --> 00:57:13,719
Speaker 4: tick an awful lot of these boxes already. Should we

1061
00:57:13,760 --> 00:57:18,880
Speaker 4: think that they're conscious? Maybe not, because clearly the theories

1062
00:57:18,920 --> 00:57:23,000
Speaker 4: are not complete. Some of the things on that checklist

1063
00:57:23,040 --> 00:57:25,600
Speaker 4: are going to be completely irrelevant to consciousness, and we're

1064
00:57:25,600 --> 00:57:29,520
Speaker 4: probably missing a whole lot of things also. But to

1065
00:57:29,600 --> 00:57:33,200
Speaker 4: the degree that there is a system that ticks more

1066
00:57:33,440 --> 00:57:35,720
Speaker 4: or less of these boxes, well maybe the ones that

1067
00:57:35,760 --> 00:57:37,880
Speaker 4: tick more of these boxes we might want to consider

1068
00:57:37,880 --> 00:57:39,960
Speaker 4: a little bit more closely. But then the other thing

1069
00:57:39,960 --> 00:57:42,360
Speaker 4: we do in that paper is talk about the ethical

1070
00:57:42,360 --> 00:57:45,040
Speaker 4: implications of false positives and false negatives.

1071
00:57:45,280 --> 00:57:48,160
Speaker 1: I think AI is a great way to differentiate between

1072
00:57:48,200 --> 00:57:50,920
Speaker 1: intelligence and consciousness, because it's not hard for me to

1073
00:57:50,920 --> 00:57:53,480
Speaker 1: believe you could build a very intelligent system, one that

1074
00:57:53,560 --> 00:57:57,439
Speaker 1: surpasses humans, that even like manipulates us and takes over

1075
00:57:57,480 --> 00:58:00,400
Speaker 1: the planet and runs us as slaves. It could be

1076
00:58:00,480 --> 00:58:04,400
Speaker 1: super intelligent without actually being conscious, without anybody being in there, right,

1077
00:58:04,480 --> 00:58:07,080
Speaker 1: And there's a dark dystopian future there, you know, where

1078
00:58:07,120 --> 00:58:11,520
Speaker 1: super intelligence actually extinguishes consciousness. But to me, you could

1079
00:58:11,600 --> 00:58:14,600
Speaker 1: maybe get an answer to the question again mathematically, if

1080
00:58:14,640 --> 00:58:18,840
Speaker 1: you could somehow build up a description of consciousness from

1081
00:58:18,960 --> 00:58:22,080
Speaker 1: the little bits inside you know the way, For example,

1082
00:58:22,120 --> 00:58:24,560
Speaker 1: you could say, hey, if you describe all the motion

1083
00:58:24,720 --> 00:58:27,400
Speaker 1: of water droplets, I can tell you whether or not

1084
00:58:27,440 --> 00:58:29,480
Speaker 1: a hurricane is going to form. Like if we can

1085
00:58:29,680 --> 00:58:33,720
Speaker 1: master the understanding of the dynamics at a small scale

1086
00:58:33,720 --> 00:58:36,080
Speaker 1: and compute it all the way up to the bigger scale,

1087
00:58:36,200 --> 00:58:38,280
Speaker 1: then we can say yes or no, there is a hurricane.

1088
00:58:38,640 --> 00:58:41,200
Speaker 1: In the same way, then I could like analyze your

1089
00:58:41,240 --> 00:58:43,760
Speaker 1: brain and I could tell you, oh, yes, this does

1090
00:58:43,800 --> 00:58:46,720
Speaker 1: emerge into some first person experience or does not. If

1091
00:58:46,760 --> 00:58:49,400
Speaker 1: we had that mathematical bridge, and then we could apply

1092
00:58:49,440 --> 00:58:52,080
Speaker 1: it to AI and say, oh, yes or no, there

1093
00:58:52,160 --> 00:58:54,960
Speaker 1: is or is not somebody in there. And I'm really

1094
00:58:55,040 --> 00:58:57,040
Speaker 1: attracted to these kinds of theories. I think they're called

1095
00:58:57,120 --> 00:59:01,240
Speaker 1: physicalism or do you call them functional theories? How much

1096
00:59:01,320 --> 00:59:04,000
Speaker 1: progress have we made in that direction and are we

1097
00:59:04,120 --> 00:59:06,520
Speaker 1: likely to make any more? Or is it too intractable

1098
00:59:06,560 --> 00:59:07,160
Speaker 1: a problem.

1099
00:59:07,320 --> 00:59:11,200
Speaker 4: I don't think it's too intractable a problem. Necessarily, I'm

1100
00:59:11,200 --> 00:59:14,400
Speaker 4: not going to fully subscribe to the hard problem of consciousness.

1101
00:59:14,400 --> 00:59:16,360
Speaker 4: I do think that if we continue to push on

1102
00:59:16,960 --> 00:59:20,320
Speaker 4: this kind of idea of emergent properties and the translation

1103
00:59:20,480 --> 00:59:24,880
Speaker 4: between a physical substrate and the information that it produces

1104
00:59:25,000 --> 00:59:27,760
Speaker 4: and that emerges from that physical substrate in terms of

1105
00:59:27,800 --> 00:59:31,840
Speaker 4: its interactions in space and in time. I think that

1106
00:59:31,880 --> 00:59:35,760
Speaker 4: will take us forward. I am a reductionist or a

1107
00:59:35,800 --> 00:59:39,520
Speaker 4: physicalist myself. I don't think that there's anything magical or

1108
00:59:39,560 --> 00:59:43,640
Speaker 4: spiritual about consciousness personally. I know that there are others

1109
00:59:43,640 --> 00:59:46,120
Speaker 4: who are going to disagree with me there, but I

1110
00:59:46,160 --> 00:59:49,000
Speaker 4: do think that if we could build such an explanation

1111
00:59:49,080 --> 00:59:51,600
Speaker 4: that it would get us a long way to understanding consciousness,

1112
00:59:51,760 --> 00:59:54,920
Speaker 4: the kind of emergent properties that you're talking about. I

1113
00:59:54,960 --> 00:59:59,280
Speaker 4: think that it's really important for us to recognize that

1114
00:59:59,320 --> 01:00:03,720
Speaker 4: the success of such an endeavor is going to need

1115
01:00:04,560 --> 01:00:07,760
Speaker 4: at its core, the assumption that the system that we

1116
01:00:07,800 --> 01:00:11,880
Speaker 4: are studying is actually conscious. Otherwise it becomes circular. Right Like,

1117
01:00:11,920 --> 01:00:14,680
Speaker 4: if I want to create an explanation of how matter

1118
01:00:14,800 --> 01:00:17,840
Speaker 4: gives rise to whatever I think is consciousness and then

1119
01:00:17,920 --> 01:00:20,200
Speaker 4: start pointing that at everything that I can think of,

1120
01:00:20,800 --> 01:00:23,320
Speaker 4: then I'm not building an explanation of consciousness. I'm building

1121
01:00:23,320 --> 01:00:25,920
Speaker 4: an explanation of I don't know, physical interactions in the

1122
01:00:26,000 --> 01:00:30,280
Speaker 4: environment or information processing in the environment. But I don't

1123
01:00:30,320 --> 01:00:31,680
Speaker 4: know that it's going to get me all the way

1124
01:00:31,720 --> 01:00:34,520
Speaker 4: to consciousness. But if we could do that in us, sure,

1125
01:00:34,800 --> 01:00:38,840
Speaker 4: in one thousand million years, when we have that explanation

1126
01:00:39,080 --> 01:00:41,560
Speaker 4: and we have a full what the philosopher Lease and

1127
01:00:41,680 --> 01:00:45,160
Speaker 4: Rochetitis would call a generative explanation of how a physical

1128
01:00:45,160 --> 01:00:48,480
Speaker 4: system and interactions in that physical system fully gives rise

1129
01:00:48,600 --> 01:00:52,560
Speaker 4: to conscious experience, Yeah, that would be great. I don't

1130
01:00:52,560 --> 01:00:54,400
Speaker 4: know how we're going to do that, but I do

1131
01:00:54,480 --> 01:00:59,040
Speaker 4: think that it does require a connection with that physical substrate.

1132
01:00:59,360 --> 01:01:02,720
Speaker 2: We're getting to the end of our time together. We've

1133
01:01:02,720 --> 01:01:05,320
Speaker 2: talked about why this is a difficult problem. Let's end

1134
01:01:05,360 --> 01:01:08,960
Speaker 2: on why it's important to keep studying this difficult problem.

1135
01:01:09,480 --> 01:01:13,640
Speaker 4: I think I'll answer this from three perspectives. One, as

1136
01:01:13,760 --> 01:01:17,080
Speaker 4: human beings, we want to understand our worlds. We want

1137
01:01:17,120 --> 01:01:19,680
Speaker 4: to understand the basic science of how things happen. We

1138
01:01:19,840 --> 01:01:26,880
Speaker 4: are curious, and we have this compelling drive to understand

1139
01:01:26,920 --> 01:01:29,680
Speaker 4: our environments. And we can see this both from the

1140
01:01:29,680 --> 01:01:32,560
Speaker 4: perspective of modern science, but also just from the perspective

1141
01:01:32,560 --> 01:01:35,760
Speaker 4: of this is literally what brains do. They build internal

1142
01:01:35,800 --> 01:01:39,400
Speaker 4: models of the world and they predict stuff that's going

1143
01:01:39,440 --> 01:01:41,840
Speaker 4: to happen from those internal models of the world, and

1144
01:01:41,880 --> 01:01:45,200
Speaker 4: we use that to drive ourselves forward. That's what evolution

1145
01:01:45,320 --> 01:01:47,600
Speaker 4: has done for us. So I think that we are

1146
01:01:47,640 --> 01:01:52,120
Speaker 4: hardwired to do this, to be natural scientists in a way.

1147
01:01:52,520 --> 01:01:54,960
Speaker 4: So I think that that's important, like to give in

1148
01:01:55,040 --> 01:01:59,560
Speaker 4: to that feeling, that compulsion. But also from a practical

1149
01:01:59,640 --> 01:02:05,560
Speaker 4: and societal benefit perspective, we can take multiple multiple prongs

1150
01:02:05,560 --> 01:02:07,880
Speaker 4: on this. So one is the medical perspective, which is

1151
01:02:07,920 --> 01:02:10,720
Speaker 4: that it's really important for us to understand the presence

1152
01:02:10,800 --> 01:02:15,080
Speaker 4: or absence of suffering in folks who have disease or injury.

1153
01:02:15,160 --> 01:02:17,960
Speaker 4: That we want to understand the diversity and heterogeneity of

1154
01:02:17,960 --> 01:02:21,920
Speaker 4: those perspectives. So here's a very concrete example. There are

1155
01:02:22,080 --> 01:02:25,560
Speaker 4: a number of disorders or conditions out there that come

1156
01:02:25,600 --> 01:02:29,240
Speaker 4: with them chronic pain, but you don't have any physical

1157
01:02:29,240 --> 01:02:32,680
Speaker 4: substrate that you can identify. You don't know why that

1158
01:02:32,720 --> 01:02:35,080
Speaker 4: person is in chronic pain, and so you don't know

1159
01:02:35,080 --> 01:02:36,880
Speaker 4: how to fix it. But that doesn't mean that the

1160
01:02:36,920 --> 01:02:40,400
Speaker 4: pain isn't real, that the suffering isn't real. And so

1161
01:02:40,560 --> 01:02:46,120
Speaker 4: from that perspective, understanding the nature of subjective experience is

1162
01:02:46,280 --> 01:02:49,960
Speaker 4: really critically important. Fear and anxiety is another one. We

1163
01:02:50,080 --> 01:02:54,240
Speaker 4: know the fear circuitry. We've mapped that. Neuroscientist Joseph Ldou

1164
01:02:54,320 --> 01:02:57,520
Speaker 4: has been instrumental in driving forward the mapping of the

1165
01:02:57,560 --> 01:03:00,880
Speaker 4: Imigdaler circuit, the fear circuit in the brain. But he's

1166
01:03:00,960 --> 01:03:05,920
Speaker 4: very careful to distinguish between processing of threatening stimului and

1167
01:03:05,960 --> 01:03:10,720
Speaker 4: the experience of fear. So if we develop pharmacological interventions

1168
01:03:11,520 --> 01:03:16,040
Speaker 4: that fix the circuitry bit and fix the behavioral bit

1169
01:03:16,120 --> 01:03:19,280
Speaker 4: in rats, one of the reasons they might not translate

1170
01:03:19,280 --> 01:03:22,680
Speaker 4: to humans is that they don't reduce the fear. They

1171
01:03:22,800 --> 01:03:26,840
Speaker 4: change the behavior, but the fear persists. So I think

1172
01:03:26,880 --> 01:03:29,720
Speaker 4: that from like a clinical perspective, it's really important for

1173
01:03:29,800 --> 01:03:33,400
Speaker 4: us to understand this and from depression, from the perspective

1174
01:03:33,560 --> 01:03:36,640
Speaker 4: of those who have autis inspective disorders, so to understand

1175
01:03:36,680 --> 01:03:40,160
Speaker 4: their subjective experiences, like there's just a huge amount of

1176
01:03:40,200 --> 01:03:42,919
Speaker 4: clinical benefit that we can build. And then finally from

1177
01:03:42,920 --> 01:03:45,840
Speaker 4: the perspective of the artificial systems that we've just been

1178
01:03:45,880 --> 01:03:49,320
Speaker 4: talking about. So we're in a position now where whether

1179
01:03:49,400 --> 01:03:54,320
Speaker 4: or not we build systems that have phenomenal awareness or consciousness,

1180
01:03:54,400 --> 01:03:57,360
Speaker 4: that whether anybody's home in there. You know, maybe we're

1181
01:03:57,400 --> 01:03:58,960
Speaker 4: not going to be able to answer that question for

1182
01:03:59,000 --> 01:04:01,520
Speaker 4: a long time. But the way we interact with systems

1183
01:04:01,600 --> 01:04:04,600
Speaker 4: depends on whether we think that they have consciousness, And

1184
01:04:04,680 --> 01:04:09,640
Speaker 4: the way that we build guardrails and legislation and assigned

1185
01:04:09,680 --> 01:04:13,280
Speaker 4: responsibility in legal settings depends on whether we think that

1186
01:04:13,360 --> 01:04:15,320
Speaker 4: these things can think for themselves, and whether they have

1187
01:04:15,360 --> 01:04:18,120
Speaker 4: moral compasses and all those things which are not necessarily

1188
01:04:18,160 --> 01:04:22,120
Speaker 4: related to conscious experience per se. But there's an argument

1189
01:04:22,120 --> 01:04:24,000
Speaker 4: to be made that, at least in a lot of

1190
01:04:24,040 --> 01:04:28,840
Speaker 4: the systems that we know about, describing responsibility is related

1191
01:04:28,960 --> 01:04:33,240
Speaker 4: to the capacity for that agent to be self directed,

1192
01:04:34,000 --> 01:04:38,840
Speaker 4: and that that seems intimately related to seeking out goals

1193
01:04:38,840 --> 01:04:41,840
Speaker 4: that are not just defined by a programmer, but ultimately

1194
01:04:41,880 --> 01:04:44,480
Speaker 4: like decisions that that thing might make that might be

1195
01:04:44,560 --> 01:04:48,120
Speaker 4: driven by its intrinsic rewards seeking. And there's something that

1196
01:04:48,160 --> 01:04:50,960
Speaker 4: it's like to seek reward because it feels good. So

1197
01:04:51,560 --> 01:04:55,080
Speaker 4: there's a lot of kind of moral and ethical and

1198
01:04:55,280 --> 01:05:00,240
Speaker 4: legislation and societal implications for getting this right, a lot

1199
01:05:00,280 --> 01:05:03,160
Speaker 4: of medical reasons to get this right. And then you know,

1200
01:05:03,200 --> 01:05:07,240
Speaker 4: from a basic science curiosity perspective, this is literally what

1201
01:05:07,280 --> 01:05:09,600
Speaker 4: we evolved to do is figure out the world, and

1202
01:05:09,680 --> 01:05:11,640
Speaker 4: so let's keep doing that as well.

1203
01:05:12,080 --> 01:05:16,920
Speaker 1: And when we meet aliens, does it matter if they're conscious, Like,

1204
01:05:17,000 --> 01:05:19,840
Speaker 1: if they're intelligent and they're interesting and they want to

1205
01:05:19,880 --> 01:05:23,480
Speaker 1: share with us their space warp drives? Does it matter

1206
01:05:23,680 --> 01:05:25,720
Speaker 1: if when we point our hair dryer at them it

1207
01:05:25,760 --> 01:05:27,440
Speaker 1: says yes or no? What do you think?

1208
01:05:27,720 --> 01:05:30,640
Speaker 4: I think so. But there's also a lot of evidence

1209
01:05:30,680 --> 01:05:34,840
Speaker 4: that consciousness and what's called moral status can be disentangled.

1210
01:05:35,440 --> 01:05:39,680
Speaker 4: That we ascribe moral status to things that we think

1211
01:05:39,720 --> 01:05:43,600
Speaker 4: are conscious, but we also don't need to require consciousness

1212
01:05:43,640 --> 01:05:47,320
Speaker 4: in order to ascribe moral status, and we certainly treat

1213
01:05:47,320 --> 01:05:49,840
Speaker 4: things very badly even if we know that they're conscious.

1214
01:05:50,760 --> 01:05:55,120
Speaker 4: So these are conceptually disentanglable things. I think that it

1215
01:05:55,160 --> 01:06:01,080
Speaker 4: will matter though for the rest of the machinery around encounter, right,

1216
01:06:01,200 --> 01:06:06,640
Speaker 4: Like maybe from an individual astronaut's perspective it doesn't matter

1217
01:06:06,720 --> 01:06:09,200
Speaker 4: so much. But from the perspective of the laws and

1218
01:06:09,240 --> 01:06:13,760
Speaker 4: regulations and societal implications of what that would mean and

1219
01:06:13,840 --> 01:06:15,880
Speaker 4: what kind of a people do we want to be,

1220
01:06:16,720 --> 01:06:19,080
Speaker 4: I think that then it really does matter. And so

1221
01:06:19,200 --> 01:06:22,840
Speaker 4: having folks at the helm who are paying attention to

1222
01:06:22,920 --> 01:06:27,280
Speaker 4: the moral implications of such a weighty determination would be

1223
01:06:27,520 --> 01:06:27,919
Speaker 4: very good.

1224
01:06:28,480 --> 01:06:30,520
Speaker 1: Well, I definitely want the aliens to know that we

1225
01:06:30,600 --> 01:06:33,040
Speaker 1: are conscious before they decide whether or not to know

1226
01:06:33,200 --> 01:06:36,680
Speaker 1: nucas from orbit so or have us as a snack.

1227
01:06:37,320 --> 01:06:40,320
Speaker 4: Assuming they ascribe moral value and moral status to meanings

1228
01:06:40,360 --> 01:06:41,840
Speaker 4: with consciousness.

1229
01:06:41,400 --> 01:06:43,480
Speaker 1: And maybe they developed the consciousness of meter and they

1230
01:06:43,480 --> 01:06:44,200
Speaker 1: can share it with us.

1231
01:06:44,560 --> 01:06:47,600
Speaker 4: Maybe here's hoping, all right.

1232
01:06:47,960 --> 01:06:49,760
Speaker 2: Well, thanks for being on the show today, Megan. This

1233
01:06:49,880 --> 01:06:50,560
Speaker 2: was fascinating.

1234
01:06:51,120 --> 01:06:52,959
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me. This was really

1235
01:06:52,960 --> 01:06:55,520
Speaker 4: fun and engaging and it's been a real pleasure.

1236
01:06:56,000 --> 01:06:56,840
Speaker 1: Thank you very much.

1237
01:07:03,640 --> 01:07:07,480
Speaker 2: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We

1238
01:07:07,520 --> 01:07:09,920
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1239
01:07:10,120 --> 01:07:12,840
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1240
01:07:13,040 --> 01:07:14,720
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1241
01:07:14,840 --> 01:07:17,800
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1242
01:07:17,800 --> 01:07:20,800
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1243
01:07:20,840 --> 01:07:21,240
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1244
01:07:21,480 --> 01:07:25,000
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1245
01:07:25,040 --> 01:07:28,160
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1246
01:07:27,320 --> 01:07:29,360
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1247
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1250
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