What Creates Consciousness?

Transcript

[Music] thank you so thank you so much for joining us this evening for this exploration of Consciousness in the age of artificial intelligence and look in any discussion of ious it is important to get one thing straight at the outset we do not know what Consciousness is and that's in light of the fact that each of us I think but I do not know for sure each of us can attest to what the experience of Consciousness is what Consciousness feels like and some of us can further attest through meditative practice ractice or chemically induced modifications can attest to what Altered States Of Consciousness are like but we are still very much in the dark regarding how it is that configurations of material particles that themselves do not seem to have any kind of inner World they somehow in aggregate generate inner worlds of phenomenological experience now look some will consider this mystery and say that I have phrased it with undue bias they'll say it is not that matter makes mind but rather that mind makes matter or in another variation mind transcends matter or in another variation matter even at the level of fundamental ingredients does contain the seeds of Consciousness containing something that some have called protoconsciousness now these issues are surely deeply compelling in their own right right I mean Consciousness is utterly essential to Life as we experience it but in recent years these issues have become yet more Central because as we all know right we are living through a transition in which artificial intelligences of various flavors right they are becoming ever more present raising the question of the insights we might glean by thinking about Consciousness in this era of artificial intelligence and to discuss these issues I am pleased to bring in two guests who have really spent decades immersed in these very questions trying to gain insight into thinking about the process of thinking so first we have David chers who is University professor of philosophy and Neuroscience and co-director of the center for mind brain and Consciousness at New York University his most recent book reality plus Virtual Worlds and the problems of philosophy was named one of 2022 best books of the Year by The Washington Post David great to see you great to be here and we also have Anil Seth who's a professor of cognitive and computational Neuroscience and director of the center for Consciousness science at the University University of Sussex he is editorinchief of Neuroscience of Consciousness and his book being you a new science of Consciousness was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller congratulations and great to see you great to see you so you know before we get into some of the details I'd like to just get a real quick sense of where each of you is coming from I think I I know the answer but just even if you want to give a yes or no that that would be good enough do you David think that an artificial system will ever be conscious I think it's possible for an AI system to be conscious I think it's possible for a machine to be conscious the brain itself is a big machine somehow that machine produces Consciousness we don't know how but it does it somehow I think if biology can do it I don't see why silicon can't do it I can't we don't understand how silicon could give us Consciousness we also understand how neurons could give us Consciousness so I don't see a difference in principle so that's a yes I take it absolutely an Neil how about you I'm going to give the annoying it depends answer depends on what we mean by by AI so I think for the kinds of AI that we have at the moment I think it's very very unlikely I think can't be ruled out but I I think that we overestimate the possibility because we can Flame Consciousness with intelligence and we have still this pervasive idea that that computation of some sort is the basis of Consciousness and I think that is really a really shaky assumption I agree with Dave that that I think Consciousness is if you like an achievement of a biological machine but to call it a machine to call the brain a machine it's a very different kind of machine and it may be the kind of machine that silicon stuff just canot can emulate yeah all right so let's just get into a little more detail so famously and I know that you've been asked this question so many times that you probably recoil at it but in 1995 you coined the term the hard problem of Consciousness which for many people certainly I include myself in that crystallized why this is such a conundrum so can you just give us a short summary of what you mean by the hard problem sure and I should say this was never an original observation I think you know everybody knew in their bones that Consciousness posed a hard problem this label just kind of crystallizes the problem and makes it a bit harder to avoid but you know you go to a conference on Consciousness and you find people talk about many different things sometimes it's just used for the difference between being asleep and being awake um sometimes it's used for the ability to control your behavior in certain considered ways sometimes it's used for the ability to report um certain internal States but I think where Consciousness is concerned those things are actually what I call the easy problems not because it's straightforward to explain them it's probably about as hard as anything in ordinary cognitive Neuroscience but we've got a paradigm for explaining those things you come up with a mechanism that produces appropriate behavior Behavior typical of a wakeful person and you'll have explained the difference between being asleep and being awake but when it comes to the hard problem of Consciousness is subjective experience and you gave a great gloss on this in your introduction it's you know it's the feeling of experience from a firstperson point of view the feeling of seeing and hearing the feeling of feeling your body and um emotions pain the feeling of thinking the the feeling of acting all the stuff that we experience subjectively and what makes it hard is those paradigms that we have in science and especially in neuroscience and cognitive science for explaining things in terms of mechanisms that do a job and producing Behavior doesn't seem to work for subjective experience there always seems to be a gap um explain yeah sleep versus Wake explain report versus not there's still the question why is it subjectively experienced seems to need a new method that's why it's a hard problem and there there I think were many and and I'm really thinking of my own journey in appreciating the depth of this problem there was a time when I would hear things like that and say it's just a matter of figuring it out it's just a matter of understanding how the brain works better Fuller more completely and once we have that somehow this explanation for phenomenological experience will emerge and then I encountered this little thought experiment which I think had a big impact on on you too and maybe Anil I don't know if you as well this this thought experiment about Mary from Frank Jackson and we have a little version of it that I'll quickly play and then maybe I can have you both comment on what you think it may be telling us about the nature of conscious experience imagine that in the Far Far Future there's a brilliant neuroscientist named Mary who for some reason is confined to a room in which everything appears in black and white there is no color of any sort whatsoever Mary can study and access and examine the world outside but it all comes to her only in black and white even so Mary is able to reach a goal that has long eluded humankind she totally and fully unravels every last detail about the structure function physiology chemistry biology and physics of the brain she knows absolutely everything there is to know about the behavior of the brain's every neuron every molecule every atom she knows precisely what goes on inside our heads the details of all neural processes that Cascade when we see a beautiful red rose or when we Marvel at a rich Blue Sky one day Mary is allowed to leave her room and the very first thing she sees is a plump Red Tomato now here's the question from this experience of the color red will Mary learn anything new will she shrug and just move on or will she be surprised or thrilled or moved or gain some new insight through this actual experience of color and if she does what does that tell us about the limits of a purely physical description of the brain and Consciousness so that's that's the little story so what should we take from and where do you come down on that story I like the thought experiment I mean this thought experiment has been used for many different purposes but I think one thing it does wonderfully is it illustrates the Gap a certain kind of gap between our understanding of the objective world and our understanding of Consciousness because you can set it up so that Mary seems to know all of the objective properties of the brain how um you know your eyes respond to different wavelengths and how it gets fed to visual cortex how it gets categorized how it is we come up with labels like red green blue and so on she knows all that before she ever sees color um so you'd think she knows everything about the world but she knows everything about the objective world but she doesn't know about the subjective experience of seeing red if she sees it for the first time it's like oh so that's what it's like to see red now Jackson goes on to argue from here that this shows there's more in the world than physical processes and that's a further that's a further story that you know involves a lot of controversial elements I think it's a wonderful illustration of this basic gap between our knowledge of the objective world and our knowledge of subjective experience and so Neil how does this story affect your thinking well I think I think I like it a bit less and this is possibly because I'm not not a philosopher um by training but I'm always suspicious of these kinds of thought experiments that sort of conceivability arguments they ask us to imagine things which actually we can't really imagine I mean what would it be like to know everything absolutely everything about anything I don't think we can ever really know what that would be like and therefore what would be surprising and what wouldn't be surprising and also you I Dave's right there is a gap here but for me it's not a surprising Gap you know knowing about the details of how something works doesn't necessarily give you the experience of being that thing like if I know everything about flying I don't become able to fly um and so I imagine that if Mary did know everything there is to know and she goes out of the door and she might say oh that's exactly how I would expect it to so she would shrug potentially probably shrug but of course she would still learn something new because she would have an experience she hasn't had before but that would be you I think just reflective of the of a gap about how we get the knowledge not some sort of Deep Gap in reality that has to be crossed that shows that Consciousness is is beyond the you know the reach of science I don't think it shows that and so when you think about Consciousness I gather that you place significant weight on the biological mechanism by which we have one example our own and how it has emerged is that do you think utterly Central to Consciousness I mean and when you when you say that are you saying that it has to be the things that make us up you know nitrogen oxygen carbon hydrogen sulfur I mean if you changed out the molecules could it still work or is it really essential that we got here from some evolutionary trail that took us you know from single cell organisms to here is that the vital part of what a biological system provides I think in practice our evolutionary history is very very important can't I don't that's true pretty much of every aspect but I think if we could sort of magically be reconstituted without having had a evolutionary history that would that would be fine too I mean there are so many things about um how we are as animals how other animals are as the animals they are that depend on their biology metabolism depends on on biology it depends on chemistry digestion does many things do so I think as a sort of first approximation it makes sense to me to think that Consciousness is another kind is another biological property it doesn't mean that necessarily only biological systems can be conscious but as you said that's the only system we know of so far and we'll try and use metaphors and we have this metaphor as the brain as a computer but it's easy to confuse a metaphor with the thing itself and when we do that that's when I think we we might get into trouble and think Consciousness could be stripped away from the stuff that we're made of and implemented in in some other thing so are you are you driven by the hard problem because I've also heard you coin an analogous type of problem called the real problem well that was mainly to annoy day just just to wind him up a little bit um but I think I mean the hard problem has been so definitional for the field when I started in in this area about now 20 years ago or something it was already you know the way the field was organized thanks thanks to day and it's way to make me feel older but but it's it's really important because it does highlight how difficult the problem is but also think that the fact that it seems difficult Now does not mean that it will always have this Aura of of there being something beyond the reach of explanation in terms of mechanisms to give a very imperfect analogy we've been here before so about 150 years ago not so long ago people thought life couldn't be explained in terms of stuff in terms of physics and chemistry there had to be something else there seemed to be an analogous hard problem of life right but of course that didn't turn out to be right there is we still don't understand every last detail of life but there's no longer a sense of conceptual mystery that we need an an Elon vital a spark of Life something beyond the laws of of nature as they are so I I like to think that as we build Bridges between explanations in terms of mechanisms and what experience is like then maybe the Hard problem won't be solved but it might be dissolved you know I tend to agree with you in fact I often make the same analogy between the fact that there was a hard problem of life and a hard problem of kind we solved the former we think but are is that too quick have we solve the hard problem of Life do we are we convinced that you know we understand the mechanism it's just a matter of putting things together in the right way I don't think it's a great analogy um to be honest in the case of Life all of the things that we really wanted to explain were kind of these objective processes of reprodu tion of adaptation of metabolism growth and uh and so on and I think it was there was a certain point where we didn't see how how it is that a physical mechanism could do those functional things so some people thought we need maybe a vital Spirit but the problem was always the problem of explaining these objective behaviors that living systems show and eventually we found how DNA and so on could extend into a a story about how that could happen whereas in the case of Consciousness you we've got analoges to all those things but those are all the easy problems yes if someone said look we can't even explain how it is that people are walking and talking and remembering and so on then uh then that would be analogous to the vitalist about life but there's this further datum in the case of Consciousness which is first person subjective experience which doesn't really have an analog in the case of life except for the case of Consciousness itself right some people have argued well actually we can't explain everything about life because Consciousness is itself a crucial aspect of life that we're not explaining but then we're just back to the same problem and so when it comes to the real problem which I guess you maybe would sort of characterize as the the easy problem I mean how how far along are we I mean in terms of even just having models of Consciousness that can give us insight into the the physical processes that allow this kind of experience to emerge some days you know when I wake up I think ah we're we're nowhere it still seems as mysterious as ever but then other days with a bit more of a sober uh look at things progress has been made and I think that's strategically that's one of the advantages I think of this easy problem real problem approach I do think they're very similar I think I call the real problem mainly because to emphasize that we can still talk about the nature of experience rather than just what people do or or say we can try and explain why vision is the way it is different from emotion different from experiences of Free Will and much more is now I think understood about the me about why these experiences are the way they are and why they are are different from each other and we are now at a stage in the Neuroscience of Consciousness with the help of other disciplines as well that we have a bunch of theories that that Target different aspects of Consciousness that are beginning to be compared and contrasted and whether we will come up with a a fully satisfactory solution to Consciousness as a whole I think that I I don't know we don't it's it's too early to say but I don't think we can exclude that as a possibility so the analogy I think operates at a different level it's not that life as a problem is the same as Consciousness as a problem it's just that something that seemed really mysterious with the tools and Concepts available at one point was no no longer so mysterious with a different set of tools and Concepts and we should all be show some humility in the face of this problem I mean very early days no one's philosophical or scientific pronouncements now are going to reflect how things are at the uh at the end of the day so I think you know we should all be open to all kinds of amazing new insights which will make what we're now saying be primitive but I actually like what anel calls the the real problem I'm not wild about the name I think you know there there are a lot of problems here but I think it is important that we can actually make progress in the science of Consciousness without solving the hard problem if we had to wait for a solution to the hard problem we might be waiting a long time for the science and one thing we've really seen over the last say three decades or so since the science of Consciousness really uh really got going is people studying things like you know the neural correlates of Consciousness those processes in the brain that correlate most directly with Consciousness you can study that scientifically without having an answer to the uh to the hard problem so I I call this the mapping problem I think of it as one of the easier problems but I totally agree with annel that this is a uh this is a really important problem for the science and it could well be that as we get better and better mappings correlations from physical processes to Consciousness somewhere along the way we'll be struck by something you know some say mathematical property of the processes and Consciousness that leads us to propose ah here is a principle that might cross the Gap yeah and and so you mentioned the number of theories that people have put forward and they are replete right we have you know integrated information Theory Global workspace intenti schema Theory I mean there are many do you have a favorite or one that guides your own thinking about that I prefer my theory let's he it so it's I mean I the others I think they all have good points one of the problems is they're all theories of slightly different things which does make them difficult to compare so the this the theory that I tend to favor I mean it's it's a collection of ideas really it's just I put it in a particular way the idea of the brain as a prediction machine so arguably it's not really a theory of Consciousness at all because it does not say like these are the sufficient conditions and then boom Consciousness happens the other theories tend to say something like this yes the idea of the brain as a prediction machine goes way back and it's really this idea that everything the brain does pretty much involves it making predictions about the causes of sensory signals and then using sensory signals to Cal at to update these predictions and when it comes to Consciousness the idea is that everything that we're conscious of whether it's an experience of the world whether it's an experience of the self whether it's an experience of free will or valtion is a kind of perception it's the brain trying to make sense of a situation in some way and in that framing every kind of conscious experience can be understood can be thought of as a as underpinned by this process of the brain making predictions and updating predictions but in different ways in in different contexts the the the sort of slogan for this is that perceptual experience is a kind of controlled hallucination that we don't read the world out objectively cre actively construct it but then the way I take it is that doesn't just apply to the world around us it applies to the experience of being a self within that world it applies to emotion it applies to Free Will and ultimately it's all about physiological regulation of the body body the reason brains do this prediction is because prediction allows control and brains evolved I think fundamentally to control regulate keep the body alive and that kind of leads if you put on this thread long enough you do get to this intimate connection between how Consciousness seems to us and the fact that we are living breathing Flesh and Blood right energy consuming creatures but in the end of the day if I understand what you're saying correctly you're not imagining that there's anything beyond the physical when it comes to Consciousness and you're not imagining that we need to modify our understanding of the fundamental ingredients that at root make up the physical it's just a matter of putting it together and getting a deeper understanding of the processes and somehow in there an explanation for Consciousness will emerge yeah I think it really should be a last resort to invoke new fundamental principles of the universe right I I I think matter is very complicated it's not just you know neurons that go that turn on and off and yeah it's not just atoms bouncing around in the void the resources of this idea of materialism that Consciousness is a property of matter suitably arranged well that there's a lot that can be done with that it's it's it seems shortsighted I think to say that well clearly we could never explain Consciousness in terms of things happening in in matter because matter is really really rich and interesting so David when you think about I mean you didn't just coin the hard problem you've been trying to solve the hard problem you know for for for decades can you imagine even if you don't know the solution the flavors of how the solutions might ultimately look sure and I think there's a few different candidates but the basic idea which I tend to focus on is finding some kind of mapping between physical processes and Consciousness and ultimately trying to boil that down to something really simple and fundamental I mean I like the predictive processing story that anel was telling about the brain as a prediction machine but I think in a way that explains too much it applies just as well to unconscious processes as to conscious processes it needs to be compli combined with some other completely different bit of Machinery to explain why some states of the brain are distinctively conscious and others um others are not and I'm I like a number of the existing theories like the global workspace Theory um as giving you the beginnings of a physical basis for Consciousness But ultimately what I would like is something like a you know in physics people say sometimes you're looking for laws so simple you can write them on the front of a t-shirt right to be like the fundamental laws of physics well if it turns out that we can't explain consciousness fully in terms of physical processing then that doesn't mean it's beyond science but it may mean we need something like another fundamental law or a fundamental principle to connect physical processes to Consciousness and then the question is will it connect to something like biology I'm skeptical you I think biology is somehow a little bit too too high level in a way I suspect it's going to connect to something like that if you look at the correlations between Consciousness and the Brain it's really the informational properties of the brain that matter and not ultimately the biological properties if you ask me what I'm really looking for um some kind of beautiful mathematical equation that connects information and computation and the Brain to Consciousness there is this integrated information theory that does some of that I'm actually very skeptical about that for some other reasons but it's at least trying to do the right kind of thing and coming up with a fundamental principle so do you allow for you know what is normally called a dualist perspective that there's Consciousness and there's the physical and what we are experiencing is some kind of interaction blending between them but it would simply be wrong to imagine that Consciousness could be solely explained by understanding the physical is that a solution that you could imagine I'm open to that kind of view and in philosophy we sometimes talk about property dualism because people when you say dualism people a lot of the time people think about a soul some non-physical entity that got attached to our body and is hanging out with our brain and interaction and then continues living after the body dies that's not the kind of thing I have in mind but the idea is rather there could be fundamental properties of the universe beyond space and time and mass and charge or whatever your the latest you know fundamental physical Theory says if it turns out that existing properties don't explain Consciousness then we should be open to the idea that hey Consciousness is itself a fundamental and importantly that there might be fun mental laws I call them psychophysical laws connecting physical processes and Consciousness and that needn't be unscientific or spooky it's just one way things could go another way things could go is it could turn out there's some element of Consciousness at the very basis of matter it's a view that you mentioned the view people call panarchism and that's extremely speculative but it's a view I take seriously if someone come up with the scientific form of pans psychism then I think we should take that seriously so the particles themselves would have potentially some kind of seed of inner experience and when you put enough of them together in the right way the aggregate yields the conscious experience and the real problem for this view is you not some people think come on this is Loopy or crazy but for me the biggest problem for this view is precisely that aggregation yeah how do you get take a bunch of conscious particles and put them together and get the kind of unified conscious experience that I'm having right now now and that's called the combination problem and nobody has a good solution to it but if somebody solves that problem then that's instantly a contender for Theory Of Consciousness well I mean maybe but I think there are other problems with it as well I think all the versions of this idea of pan psychism that they've encountered all face the problem that not only is it not testable in itself but it doesn't lead to testable predictions um and I think that's doesn't mean it's wrong it just means that it's very hard as a scientist to know what to do with a view like pan psychism is a philosophical thesis it's not itself a testable Theory but a specific pans psychist theory that came up with with say some mathematical principles that say under these conditions you know you get this kind of this kind of physical system this kind of Consciousness that specific panus theories could be tested then yes but I haven't seen any any like that that's very early days we don't have any good theories of Consciousness number one thing to keep can you imagine then that one day we may all Converge on an answer that at least in particle physics we seem to be satisfied with maybe we shouldn't when if you ask me what do you mean by the mass of a particle I'd actually tell you functionally what the mass does how it responds to gravity how it responds to forces if you said to me what do you mean by the electric charge of a particle I kind of play the same game I'd say well in an electric field it will do this or that based upon the charge but I would be unable to tell you what mass is and what charge is there are primitive fundamentals that exist in the universe and I'm willing to say okay they exist by Fiat I know they're there and go forward could it be that one day we simply say Consciousness it's just this fundamental quality of reality and it doesn't have a deeper explanation and you take it as a given and you go forward this is great because U yeah the Norwegian philosopher had a hustle Mur has called this the hard problem of matter like you say we don't know what Consciousness is you said we actually don't know what mass is you know physics tells us what mass does and the equations um it's involved in but what actually is mass what is the intrinsic nature um of mass or of charge or maybe even of space and time and yeah philosophers and scientists argue about this is the universe just mathematical is it structural I mean a lot of people I think want to say there is no intrinsic nature of mass that's just a chimera you're looking for you know what mass does that's all there is and so somebody could take that view for Consciousness too all there is to Consciousness is what it does the trouble is in the case of Consciousness what it does that's just the easy problems and leaves out the central datm of subjective experience if somebody finds a way to take subjective experience seems intrinsic and just turn that into a uh a problem about what Consciousness does then and that might be a uh that might be an Avenue to a solution but so far anytime anyone does that which happens a lot it just looks like a bait and switch you've moved from talking about Consciousness to talking about Behavior exactly something El so Neil can I just ask you one question long because I do want to get to this issue of of AI systems and and so you know we're now in a realm where there are computational systems that are mimicking certain aspects of behavior they're able to respond to certain prompts and a way that ordinarily we would have thought only an intelligent human being could do and of course the question comes to to four of are these systems conscious it's pretty clear they're they're not yet but could they be conscious and of course it's a deep question important one but how could we ever possibly know I mean this is another very hard problem about how we test for Consciousness in things that are not us when we face this even with other human beings I mean it's often said that I only know for sure that I'm conscious it's a just an inference that that you are that you are than any of you are but it's a reasonbly safeer wondering but you would say that you would say that it's a pretty safe inference though me too um not so sure uh but because we have so much else in common right we we can basically it would be very strange if it was only me that was conscious given everything else that that we have in common the further we get away from the Benchmark of an intact human being the harder it gets even with uh human patients suffering brain injury already very difficult to know whether they're conscious because whether they are or not can be dissociated from their behavior their ability to tell you that they're conscious and then the further we get we have huge debates about non-human animals there was a recent New York declaration about animal Consciousness trying to just put the idea in people's minds that many non-human animals might be conscious vegan just saying but go ahead when it comes to computers and AI it's so much harder and I think here we're misled by our psychological biases now we as humans we have got a pretty terrible track record of withdrawing of of withholding moral consideration from things that are not us yeah and part of the reason we do this is because they don't seem sufficiently similar to us in ways that we think matter and the ways that we think matter tend to be things that we think make US Special like language intelligence of course it's questionable how intelligent we are as a species but we tend to elevate ourselves and think okay no no language no consciousness dayar did something like this many many centuries ago so we might make false negatives a lot with AI I think we're in almost exactly the opposite situation we have these language models that exercise our biases they speak to us they seem to be intelligent in some way that's still easy to catch out but but something interesting is going on there so because they're similar to us in the ways that we Elevate and that we we tend to um prioritize we project qualities into them that they probably don't have like thinking understanding and of course yeah Consciousness whereas they're very different to us in other ways and it's those other ways in which they're very different that might actually matter for Consciousness and if we if we were seeking to build a conscious just call it AI just as a blanket term for something computational that we build should we base it on trying to mimic the architecture of the brain or again is that just such a limited way of thinking about how the process of thinking might be generated this is the one sorry this is this is the one case we know about so I mean it's true when it comes to AI you know AI systems are a long way from uh from human brains any non-human system is some distance from the one case we know for sure about so there is something to be said for looking at humanlike AI simply because it's going to be as similar to us as possible but in a different substrate so one idea that I like is the idea of you know gradually replacing parts of your your brain say replace biological neurons can you take us through this because I think it's a curious way of thinking about ah here we good we got brain uh yeah brain uploading so this is a uh a drawing of the uh the philosopher Susan Schneider who's written about this by an illustrator from my book reality class called Tim peacock and yeah just say we gradually replace neurons in our brains by silicon chips which are as similar as possible and first you replace 1% of the brain 10% of the brain I guess right here we're seeing uh about 50% of the brain uh replaced and she's still saying I'm still here it's like the Silicon chips are doing their job just as well then we go all the way sounding more more like Siri right as you go we get all the way to 100% And she says yeah I'm still here we you could do that I could do that and then at that very moment maybe we would then have the first person datum that we are conscious although we are made of silicon and that would be a kind of so would that experiment that thought experiment if it were successful in the real world would that convince you but I don't think it could be successful in the real world I think it's another example of these these nice thought experiments that we can help ourselves to but actually if you unpack what it's asking it's it's very very difficult to imagine anything like this could happen I think I think that that matters because it matters for the conclusions that we we draw we have this very nice idea that you gradually replace every neuron every connection with a wire and a little silicon chip but brains aren't really the kinds of things where you can do that they're everything that the brain does is incredibly entrenched intertwined there are chemicals swishing is that just complex it doesn't it just make it difficult it it does make it difficult but it makes it difficult in a way that I think undermines the utility of thinking about these simple thought experiments is just not something that you could do I mean very basically I think the brain is is the kind of system where you can't cleanly separate what it does from what it is now sometimes a neuron fires it's not to communicate with other neurons it's to get rid of metabolic waste products so if you're going to get a model neuron that that does that you have to to then not only replace all the neurons and connections but all the stuff all the metabolism that's going on underneath as well and before you know it you know it's no longer possible to build it out of silicon just as it's not possible to like build a replica of the Brooklyn Bridge out of string cheese you just you just can't do it it doesn't work like that and so you made reference to human exceptionalism is perhaps misleading us or perhaps giving us guidance right really depends on the problem and how you apply the idea but can you imagine maybe I should say this to David first but I you know because you've already said you don't even think it's possible but can you imagine that human consciousness is just one example of this huge spectrum of conscious likee experiences that can be instantiated in other systems that could be artificial or they could be organic and that what we consider sort of this this you know wondrous quality of being a human being is actually just a pedestrian example of something that can take on so many other forms I think that's that's very likely right I mean the history of of Science and philosophy over the centuries has repeatedly shown us we're not at the center of things and we're not the only that at the top of Every Mountain we're not at the center of the universe we're not separate from all other animal created by God and human consciousness is one way of of being conscious and it's one little region in a vast space of possible ways of being conscious many non-human animals will be conscious in different ways and I do think it's Consciousness is very likely something that's a material phenomenon so it's very plausible to me that it could be implemented in something else but maybe not in computers another example where I worry about a lot more than GPT 5 suddenly feeling really feeling things are emerging neurotechnologies things like brain organoids these are collections of human brain cells grown from stem cells in dishes and they don't exercise any of our biases because they don't do anything you know they just kind of sit there in a dish and but they're made out of the same stuff and they self-organized and they display electrical activity so immediately a whole area of uncertainty goes away now frankly we don't know whether it matters what we're made out of and we just don't know whether it matters or not and so if you put that uncertainty out for me it's much more plausible that in 10 years we have grown conscious systems in the lab than they've come out of the next generation of open AI chat B I see and so David final question whether we grow new conscious systems in the lab in some glorified petri dish or able to create them at open AI micro whatever wherever it happens you know should we be thinking about the the ethical moral side of this I mean if there's this conscious being that maybe can't even communicate its conscious state do we do we worry about that I think absolutely I mean Consciousness many people think including me Consciousness is kind of the gateway to the circle of morality the circle of being that we care about the moment you acknowledge that animal I mean there's a debate about whether fish let's say are conscious but the moment you acknowledge that a fish is conscious and can feel pain and suffer then suddenly a fish is a being that we should at least take into consideration in our moral Calculus if you don't take conscious beings into consideration there's the danger of moral catastrophe so I think this very much applies to Ai and even to the emerging systems like the uh the large language models of the GPT family we don't know for sure whether they're conscious there's various reasons for thinking there's potential obstacles to Consciousness they haven't overcome yet but I think it's entirely possible that in the next 10 years or so we will develop language models that overcome those obstacles and show every sign of being conscious we've already got language models which are very close to passing the traditional touring test being indistinguishable from human beings and ation some personas generated by GPT 4 of past 5 minute touring test in the past we would have said that's evidence of Consciousness now maybe it's not maybe for various reasons we want to resist that all I want to that question though is all important because if we just if an AI system is conscious like a human and we continue to treat it simply like a tool so that we don't even have to take take it into account in uh in what we do we are in danger of yeah of moral catastrophy well I will simply say that all my my prompts to chat are incredibly respectful so anyway it's a great conversation thank you thank you so much thank you very much [Music]